Ilya Sutskever (; ; born 1985/86) is a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist working in machine learning, who co-founded and serves as Chief Scientist of OpenAI.
He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.
Early life and education
Sutskever was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, then called "Gorky", at the time part of the Soviet Union, and at age 5 immigrated with his family to Israel. He spent his formative years in Jerusalem.
Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002 before moving with his family to Canada and transferred to the University of Toronto, where he then obtained his BSc (2005) in mathematicsand his MSc and PhD in computer science under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton.
Career and research
After graduation in 2012, Sutskever spent two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. Four months later, in March 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.
At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm. He is also a co-inventor of AlexNet and has worked on TensorFlow.
At the end of 2015, he left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.
In 2023, he announced that he will co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which tries to solve the alignment of superintelligences in 4 years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.
Awards and honours
2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. 2018, Sutskever was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018 and AI Frontiers Conference 2018. 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).