Ilya Sutskever | |
|---|---|
| איליה סוצקבר Илья Суцкевер | |
 Ilya Sutskever (right) with Sam Altman at Tel Aviv University in 2023 | |
| Born | Илья Суцкевер 1985 or 1986 (age 37–38)[4] |
| Citizenship | Canadian, Israeli |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | AlexNet Co-founding OpenAI |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Machine learning Neural networks Artificial intelligence Deep learning[1] |
| Institutions | University of Toronto Stanford University Google Brain OpenAI |
| Thesis | Training Recurrent Neural Networks (2013) |
| Doctoral advisor | Geoffrey Hinton[2][3] |
| Website | www |
Ilya Sutskever FRS (/ˈɪljə ˈsuːtskɪvər/; Hebrew: איליה סוצקבר; Russian: Илья́ Суцке́вер [ɪˈlʲja sʊtsˈkʲevʲɪr] born 1985/86)[4] is a computer scientist working in machine learning.[1] He is a co-founder and former Chief Scientist at OpenAI.[7]
He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning.[8][9][10] In 2023, Sutskever was one of the members of the OpenAI board who fired CEO Sam Altman; Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.[11] Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.[12]
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.[13] He spent his formative years in Jerusalem.[14]
Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002.[15] After that, he moved to Canada with his family and attended the University of Toronto in Ontario.
From the University of Toronto, Sutskever received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 2005,[15][16][6][17] a Master of Science in computer science in 2007,[16][18] and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 2013.[3][19][20] His doctoral supervisor was Geoffrey Hinton.[2]
In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. To support the computing demands of AlexNet, Sutskever bought many GTX 580 GPUs online.[21]
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From November to December 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the 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.[22]
At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm,[23] and worked on TensorFlow.[24]
At the end of 2015, he left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.[25][26][27]
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.[28]
Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the non-profit entity which controls OpenAI.[29] The Information speculated that the firing of Sam Altman in part resulted from a conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.[30] In a company all-hands meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever stated that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty",[31] though in the following week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ousting.[32] The firing of Altman and resignation of Brockman led to resignation of three senior researchers from OpenAI.[33] Following these events, Sutskever stepped down from the board of OpenAI.[34]
