Ilya Sutskever

Co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, key contributor to AlexNet, GPT, and the foundational scaling-laws insight — left OpenAI in 2024 to found Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Ilya Sutskever is one of the most influential AI researchers alive. Born in Russia, raised in Israel, completed PhD with Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. He was a key contributor to AlexNet (2012), helped found Google Brain, then co-founded OpenAI in 2015 where he served as Chief Scientist for nearly a decade. He matters because much of OpenAI's foundational work — the GPT line, the scaling-is-everything thesis, the technical bet on transformers at frontier scale — bears his imprint. Sutskever championed the view (now mainstream) that just scaling up transformers and data would yield enormous capability gains. He was at the center of the November 2023 board crisis at OpenAI, briefly siding with the board that fired Sam Altman before reversing his position. The relationship was clearly damaged; he formally left OpenAI in May 2024. In June 2024 he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) with the explicit one-line goal of building safe superintelligence — no products, no revenue, just research. SSI raised $1B+ in early funding on the strength of his name. Sutskever's new venture is one of the most-watched AI startups, even though it has shipped nothing publicly. Related: OpenAI, Sam Altman, scaling laws, AGI, alignment.