Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Safe Superintelligence
At 16 he spent a month in a Canadian high school before entering university as a third-year student; he later co-built AlexNet and co-founded OpenAI.
- Born
- 1986, Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Soviet Union
- Now
- Co-founder and CEO, Safe Superintelligence
- Studied
- University of Toronto
Ilya is an author on research papers covered in Inside Anthropic: the papers.
Interesting facts
- Early start
Started taking classes at the Open University of Israel in eighth grade.
en.wikipedia.org - Early start
After moving to Canada at 16, he spent one month in high school before the University of Toronto admitted him as a third-year undergraduate.
en.wikipedia.org - First
Co-built AlexNet in 2012 with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky, an image recognizer that proved the power of then-niche neural networks.
en.wikipedia.org - In their words
Tweeted in 2022 that today's large neural networks may be "slightly conscious," setting off a debate about AI consciousness.
en.wikipedia.org - Numbers
Safe Superintelligence raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation in April 2025 without any public product.
calcalistech.com - Side project
He is a character in the 2026 movie Artificial, played by Yura Borisov.
en.wikipedia.org
Career
- Safe SuperintelligenceCo-founder and CEO2024 to now
- OpenAICo-founder and Chief Scientist2015–2024
- GoogleResearch Scientist, Google Brain2013–2015
- DNNResearchCo-founder2012–2013
Education
- PhD, Computer science, University of Toronto, 2013
- MSc, Computer science, University of Toronto, 2007
- BSc, Mathematics, University of Toronto, 2005
