Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever is the previous Chief Scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT and a driving force in the development of artificial general intelligence. Widely recognized as one of the foremost minds in artificial intelligence, Sutskever’s career has been shaped by groundbreaking contributions to deep learning and neural networks.

He earned his Ph.D. under the mentorship of Dr. Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, where he co-authored the influential 2012 AlexNet paper, ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks—a foundational work that helped ignite the modern AI revolution. Following his doctorate, Sutskever completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain.

Sutskever also played a key role as the only non-Google co-author of the seminal 2016 AlphaGo paper, which demonstrated the power of reinforcement learning in mastering complex strategy games. With a career spanning academia and industry, Sutskever continues to shape the future of AI through his leadership at OpenAI, where safety and scale remain at the core of his work.