Ilya Sutskever

Sutskever was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, then called "Gorky", at the time part of the Soviet Union, and at age 5 immigrated with his family to Israel.[10] He spent his formative years in Jerusalem.[11]

Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002[12] before moving with his family to Canada and transferred to the University of Toronto, where he then obtained his BSc (2005) in mathematics[12][13][3][14]and his MSc[15][13] and PhD[6][16][17] in computer science under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton.[5]

Sutskever (second from right) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2014

After graduation in 2012, Sutskever spent two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. Four months later, in March 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.[18]

At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm. He is also a co-inventor of AlexNet[19] and has worked on TensorFlow.[20]

At the end of 2015, he left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.[21][22][23]

In 2023, he announced that he will co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which tries to solve the alignment of superintelligences in 4 years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.[24]