AI Inventors

Ilya Sutskever - Co-founder and Former Chief Scientist of OpenAI

By Kamal Kashyap • Jul 02, 2026
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Ilya Sutskever is a world-renowned computer scientist who co-founded OpenAI and served as its Chief Scientist. He is a co-creator of AlexNet and co-founder of SSI.

Introduction

Ilya Sutskever is a highly influential Russian-Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning and deep artificial neural networks. He is the co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI. In 2024, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI).

Academic Background

Sutskever moved to Israel at age five and later to Canada. He completed his Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton. During his PhD, he co-developed AlexNet, which revolutionized the field of computer vision.

Contributions & Safe Superintelligence

Sutskever worked at Google Brain as a research scientist before co-founding OpenAI in 2015. He was instrumental in creating GPT, Codex, and DALL-E. In 2024, he launched SSI to build a superintelligent system focusing solely on safety, with no commercial distractions.

Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever
Company OpenAI / SSI
Country Israel / Canada
Born December 08, 1986 (age 39)
Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Education University of Toronto (PhD under Geoffrey Hinton)
Notable work AlexNet, Sequence to Sequence Learning, GPT models, SSI
Title Co-founder of OpenAI & SSI

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