Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever (born December 8, 1986) is a machine-learning researcher who cofounded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist until 2024, and who cofounded the lab Safe Superintelligence in June 2024. Born in Nizhny Novgorod in the Soviet Union, he emigrated to Israel as a child and later to Canada, and took his doctorate at the University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton, with whom he built the 2012 neural network AlexNet that is widely credited with igniting the modern deep-learning era. He was one of the directors who voted to fire OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman on November 17, 2023, then publicly reversed himself days later, and he departed the company in May 2024.¹²

From Hinton's Lab to Google to OpenAI

Sutskever completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto in 2012, advised by Hinton. That year he, Hinton, and fellow graduate student Alex Krizhevsky built AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network that won the ImageNet image-recognition competition by a wide margin and demonstrated that GPU-trained deep networks could outperform every competing approach. The three packaged the work into a company, DNNresearch, which Google acquired in 2013, bringing Sutskever to Google Brain, where he co-developed sequence-to-sequence learning, a method that applied deep networks to ordered data such as words and sentences and underpinned advances in machine translation.¹²

In 2015 Sutskever left Google to become a cofounder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, recruited by Altman and Elon Musk into the nonprofit they launched that December with a billion-dollar funding pledge. Over the next several years he directed the research that produced the GPT family of large language models and, in late 2022, ChatGPT. In a 2023 MIT Technology Review interview he described his growing preoccupation with AI safety and alignment, saying that he had begun to spend much of his time on the problem of controlling systems far more capable than humans.²³

The November 2023 Board Crisis

On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, saying he had not been "consistently candid" in his communications with the directors. Sutskever was one of the four voting directors who ousted him, alongside Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, the latter two tied to the Effective Altruism movement, and he was reported to have delivered the news to Altman. The board's stated concern centered on the pace of commercialization relative to safety, and the episode was read across the industry as a clash between OpenAI's safety-focused governance and its commercial trajectory.⁴⁵

Within days the move collapsed. Roughly 700 OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to resign and follow Altman to Microsoft, and on November 20 Sutskever signed that letter and posted on the platform X that he "deeply regret[ted]" his participation in the board's actions and would do everything he could to reunite the company. Altman was reinstated under a reconstituted board, and Sutskever lost his board seat while remaining an employee. He largely vanished from public view in the months that followed before announcing his departure on May 14, 2024, thanking the company and saying he was confident OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence that is "safe and beneficial."⁴⁵

Safe Superintelligence

In June 2024 Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a lab he cofounded with the investor and former Apple AI executive Daniel Gross and the former OpenAI researcher Daniel Levy, declaring in a launch statement that the company had "one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence" and that it would pursue that aim with no near-term commercial products to divert it. The company raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion-dollar valuation in September 2024, then a further 2 billion dollars at a 32-billion-dollar valuation reported in April 2025, with backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alphabet, and Nvidia.⁶⁷

In June 2024 Meta Platforms attempted to acquire SSI; Sutskever rebuffed the approach, and Meta instead hired Gross, who left SSI on June 29, 2025 to join Meta's superintelligence division. Sutskever, who had been a cofounder, then became chief executive of SSI, with Levy as president, writing that the company would remain independent: "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence."⁸