Ilya Sutskever

Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist. As a student of Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers. at the University of Toronto he co-created AlexNetAlexNet, prop. n.: The neural network that won a major image-recognition contest by a huge margin in 2012, convincing researchers and companies that deep learning trained on graphics chips was the way forward. (2012), and at Google BrainGoogle Brain, prop. n.: Google's deep-learning research team from 2011 to 2023, where the transformer — the design behind today's chatbots — and the TensorFlow software were created. he co-introduced sequence-to-sequence learningsequence-to-sequence model, n.: A model that turns one sequence into another, such as a French sentence into English or speech into text, by first reading the whole input and then writing the output step by step. (with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, 2014), a basis of neural machine translationmachine translation, n.: Software that renders writing or speech in one language into another language, as online translation services and phone translation apps do.. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. and became its chief scientist, a leading proponent of the bet that scaling up neural networks would keep improving them (see scaling hypothesisscaling hypothesis, n.: The bet that today's AI methods, simply made bigger with more computing power and data, will keep getting smarter — possibly all the way to human-level intelligence and beyond — without needing fundamentally new ideas.) through the GPTGPT, abbr.: Short for 'generative pre-trained transformer', the family of OpenAI models behind ChatGPT. The letters are also used loosely for any similar chatbot model. series and ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom.. In 2023 he co-led OpenAI's superalignmentsuperalignment, n.: The problem of keeping AI systems far smarter than humans aligned with human intentions — and the name of OpenAI's short-lived 2023–2024 research team devoted to it. team with Jan Leike and, as a board member, joined the November vote to remove Sam AltmanSam Altman, prop. n.: An American entrepreneur who co-founded OpenAI and runs it; the company's 2022 release of ChatGPT turned him into one of the public faces of the AI era. as chief executive (OpenAI leadership crisis (2023)OpenAI leadership crisis (2023), n.: The five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired chief executive Sam Altman, nearly all staff threatened to quit, and he returned with a new board.), a decision he soon said he regretted. He left OpenAI in May 2024 and the next month co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.Safe Superintelligence Inc., prop. n.: A company started in 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of OpenAI, with the single goal of building a superintelligent AI that is safe. It sells no products. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, with safe superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist. as its only goal; he became its chief executive in July 2025.