# Ilya Sutskever

Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Safe Superintelligence. TIME100 AI 2026, Thinkers. 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. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))

- Born: 1986, Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Soviet Union ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- Education: PhD, Computer science, University of Toronto, 2013; MSc, Computer science, University of Toronto, 2007; BSc, Mathematics, University of Toronto, 2005 ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- Career: Safe Superintelligence (Co-founder and CEO, 2024 to now); OpenAI (Co-founder and Chief Scientist, 2015–2024); Google (Research Scientist, 2013–2015); DNNResearch (Co-founder, 2012–2013) ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever), [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-will-lead-safe-superintelligence-following-his-ceos-exit/), [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilya-sutskever))
- TIME profile: https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/ilya-sutskever/
- Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/most-influential-people-in-ai/ilya-sutskever

- Started taking classes at the Open University of Israel in eighth grade. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- Tweeted in 2022 that today's large neural networks may be "slightly conscious," setting off a debate about AI consciousness. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))
- Safe Superintelligence raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation in April 2025 without any public product. ([calcalistech.com](https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjfywdtajl))
- He is a character in the 2026 movie Artificial, played by Yura Borisov. ([en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Sutskever))