Ilya Sutskever

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 after he was reportedly part of a failed effort to replace CEO Sam Altman. Shortly afterward, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, with “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence,” he says. Details about what exactly the startup is up to are scant: It has no product and no revenue yet. But investors are clamoring for a piece anyway, and it’s been able to raise $2 billion, with its latest valuation reportedly rising to $32 billion this month. SSI is based in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel. Ilya Sutskever received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Toronto working with Geoffrey Hinton. After completing his PhD, he cofounded DNNResearch with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky which was acquired by Google. He is interested in all aspects of neural networks and their applications. Born in the Soviet Union, he spent his formative years in Israel and emigrated to Canada as a teenager. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, he helped create a breakthrough in an A.I. technology called neural networks. In 2015, Mr. Sutskever left a job at Google and helped found OpenAI alongside Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk.