PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever is a researcher and CEO of Safe Superintelligence. He completed a Toronto doctorate with Geoffrey Hinton and worked with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky on AlexNet, which won the 2012 ImageNet competition. At Google, he coauthored sequence-to-sequence research with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. OpenAI launched in 2015 with Sutskever as research director. He later became chief scientist and co-led Superalignment with Jan Leike. As a board member, he participated in the November 2023 removal of Sam Altman and then publicly expressed regret. He left OpenAI in 2024. SSI named him CEO in July 2025 and announced a computing partnership in 2026. Safe superintelligence remains the company's stated product goal.

Now at
Safe Superintelligence
Works
107

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Photo of Ilya Sutskever

Timeline

  1. 2012

    The image competition

    With Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he helps develop the ImageNet-winning network known as AlexNet.

  2. 2014

    From pictures to sentences

    He, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le publish sequence-to-sequence learning research.

  3. 2015

    A new research lab

    OpenAI launches with him as research director.

  4. 2024

    Leaving and starting again

    He leaves OpenAI and starts a new chapter at Safe Superintelligence.

  5. 2025–today

    Researcher and CEO

    SSI names him CEO and later announces a partnership to expand computing capacity.

Sources and credits

Photo: Eladkarmel, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Training Recurrent Neural Networks: doctoral thesis, 2013 cs.utoronto.ca. Checked 10 October 2026.
  2. ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, 2012 papers.nips.cc. Checked 10 October 2026.
  3. Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks, 2014 research.google. Checked 10 October 2026.
  4. Introducing OpenAI, 11 December 2015 openai.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  5. Introducing Superalignment, 5 July 2023 openai.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  6. OpenAI announces leadership transition, 17 November 2023 openai.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  7. Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI, 14 May 2024 openai.com. Checked 10 October 2026.
  8. Safe Superintelligence: mission statement ssi.inc. Checked 10 October 2026.
  9. SSI: updates, July 2025 and July 2026 ssi.inc. Checked 10 October 2026.
  10. Ilya Sutskever: public regret statement, 20 November 2023 x.com. Checked 10 October 2026.