Ilya Sutskever
FRS
איליה סוצקבר‎
Илья Суцкевер
Born
Илья Ефимович Суцкевер
Ilya Efimovich Sutskever

1985/86[4]
Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union[5][6]
CitizenshipCanadian, Israeli, Russian[citation needed]
Alma mater
Known forAlexNet
Co-founding OpenAI
Founding SSI Inc.
Scientific career
FieldsMachine learning
Neural networks
Artificial intelligence
Deep learning[1]
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
Stanford University
Google Brain
OpenAI
ThesisTraining Recurrent Neural Networks (2013)
Doctoral advisorGeoffrey Hinton[2][3]
Websitewww.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/ Edit this at Wikidata

Ilya Sutskever FRS (born 1985/86[4]) is a computer scientist who specializes in machine learning.[1]

Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning.[7][8][9] He is notably the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.[10]

Sutskever co-founded and is a former chief scientist at OpenAI.[11] In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board who fired CEO Sam Altman; Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.[12][13]

Early life and education

[edit]

Sutskever was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, then called Gorky, at the time part of the Soviet Union, and at age 5 emigrated with his family to Israel,[14] where he lived until age 15.[15]

Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel between 2000 and 2002.[16] After that, he moved to Canada with his family and attended the University of Toronto in Ontario.

Sutskever received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 2005,[16][17][6][18] a Master of Science in computer science in 2007,[17][19] and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 2013.[3][20][21] His doctoral supervisor was Geoffrey Hinton.[2]

In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. To support AlexNet's computing demands, he bought many GTX 580 GPUs online.[22]

Career and research

[edit]
Sutskever (second from right) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2014

In 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. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.[23]

At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm,[24] and worked on TensorFlow.[25] He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors.[26]

At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.[27][28][29]

Sutskever is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.[30][31] In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which is trying to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.[32]

Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI.[33] The Information speculated that Sam Altman's firing resulted in part from a conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.[34] In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty",[35] but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster.[36] Altman's firing and Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI.[37] After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board.[38] After that, he was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work and could not lead it.[39]

In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and safety protocols. Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership.[40]

In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.[41] In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then".[13]

Awards and honors

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b Ilya Sutskever publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  2. ^ a b Ilya Sutskever at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Edit this at Wikidata
  3. ^ a b Sutskever, Ilya (2013). Training Recurrent Neural Networks. utoronto.ca (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/36012. OCLC 889910425. ProQuest 1501655550. Archived from the original on 26 March 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  4. ^ a b Simonite, Tom (18 August 2015). "Ilya Sutskever". technologyreview.com. Archived from the original on 15 May 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  5. ^ "Heard It Through the AI | University of Toronto Magazine". University of Toronto Magazine. 28 September 2022. Archived from the original on 29 May 2023. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  6. ^ a b "Season 1 Ep. 22 Ilya Sutskever". The Robot Brains Podcast. 21 September 2021. Archived from the original on 1 May 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022 – via YouTube.
  7. ^ Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Hinton, Geoffrey E (2012). "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 25. Curran Associates, Inc.
  8. ^ Srivastava, Nitish; Hinton, Geoffrey; Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Salakhutdinov, Ruslan (2014). "Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting". Journal of Machine Learning Research. 15 (56): 1929–1958. ISSN 1533-7928.
  9. ^ Sutskever, Ilya; Vinyals, Oriol; Le, Quoc V. (8 December 2014). "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks". Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2. NIPS'14. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press: 3104–3112. arXiv:1409.3215.
  10. ^ Alex Krizhevsky; Ilya Sutskever; Geoffrey E. Hinton (24 May 2017). "ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks". Communications of the ACM. 60 (6): 84–90. doi:10.1145/3065386. ISSN 0001-0782. Wikidata Q59445836.
  11. ^ Metz, Cade (19 April 2018). "A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 1 March 2023. Retrieved 22 October 2018.
  12. ^ "Safe Superintelligence Inc". SSI. 19 June 2024. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  13. ^ a b Vance, Ashlee (19 June 2024). "Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence". Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  14. ^ מן, יובל (18 November 2022). ""הבינה המלאכותית מהמדע הבדיוני תהפוך למציאות"". Ynet (in Hebrew). Archived from the original on 18 April 2023. Retrieved 18 April 2023.
  15. ^ Ansari, Tasmia (7 March 2023). "The Brain That Supercharged ChatGPT, ImageNet and TF". Analytics India Magazine. Archived from the original on 14 March 2023. Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  16. ^ a b "Neural networking". The Varsity. 25 October 2010. Archived from the original on 8 June 2020. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  17. ^ a b Johnston, Jessica Leigh (8 December 2010). "A Neural Network for a New Millennium". University of Toronto Magazine. Archived from the original on 14 April 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  18. ^ Ilya Sutskever on LinkedIn Edit this at Wikidata
  19. ^ Sutskever, Ilya (2007). Nonlinear multilayered sequence models. utoronto.ca (MSc thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/119676. OCLC 234120052. Archived from the original on 24 March 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  20. ^ "RAM Workshop". thespermwhale.com. Archived from the original on 5 December 2022. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  21. ^ "Episode 85: A Conversation with Ilya Sutskever". Voices in AI. Gigaom. Archived from the original on 22 March 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  22. ^ "Exclusive: Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 1 November 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2023.
  23. ^ McMillan, Robert (13 March 2013). "Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning". wired.com. Archived from the original on 16 June 2018. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  24. ^ a b Anon (2022). "Ilya Sutskever". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 15 March 2023. Retrieved 12 May 2022.
  25. ^ Martín Abadi; Ashish Agarwal; Paul Barham; et al. (16 March 2016), TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems (PDF), arXiv:1603.04467, Wikidata Q29040034
  26. ^ David Silver; Aja Huang; Chris J. Maddison; et al. (27 January 2016). "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search". Nature. 529 (7587): 484–489. doi:10.1038/NATURE16961. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 26819042. Wikidata Q28005460.
  27. ^ "OpenAI Blog". 12 December 2015. Archived from the original on 6 October 2021. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  28. ^ www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/ Edit this at Wikidata
  29. ^ Metz, Cade (27 April 2016). "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free". wire.com. Archived from the original on 27 April 2016. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  30. ^ Ansari, Tasmia (7 March 2023). "The Brain That Supercharged ChatGPT, ImageNet and TF". AIM. Retrieved 17 May 2024.
  31. ^ Heaven, Will Douglas (2 May 2023). "Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he's now scared of the tech he helped build". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 17 May 2024.
  32. ^ "Introducing Superalignment". openai.com. Archived from the original on 14 July 2023. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  33. ^ "Our structure". Archived from the original on 29 July 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023. OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, composed of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.
  34. ^ "Before OpenAI Ousted Altman, Employees Disagreed Over AI 'Safety'". The Information. Archived from the original on 18 November 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  35. ^ Edwards, Benj (18 November 2023). "Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 19 November 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  36. ^ Rosenberg, Scott (20 November 2023). "OpenAI's Sutskever says he regrets board's firing of Altman". Axios. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  37. ^ Thompson, Polly. "3 senior OpenAI researchers resign in the wake of Sam Altman's shock dismissal as CEO, report says". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 18 November 2023. Retrieved 18 November 2023.
  38. ^ "OpenAI announces return of Sam Altman as CEO". 22 November 2023.
  39. ^ Kahn, Jeremy (21 May 2024). "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat the most dangerous kind of AI—but never delivered, sources say". Fortune. Retrieved 22 May 2024.
  40. ^ Samuel, Sigal (17 May 2024). ""I lost trust": Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded". Vox. Retrieved 18 May 2024.
  41. ^ Tabassum, Juveria (19 June 2024). "Former OpenAI chief scientist to start a new AI company". Reuters.
  42. ^ "35 Innovators Under 35: Ilya Sutskever". technologyreview.com. Archived from the original on 4 May 2019. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  43. ^ Martin, Scott (15 September 2018). "Reinforcement Learning 'Really Works' for AI Against Pro Gamers, OpenAI Trailblazer Says". Nvidia Blog. Nvidia. Archived from the original on 28 March 2023. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
  44. ^ "The man who revolutionized computer vision, machine translation, games and robotics · AI Frontiers Conference". aifrontiers.com. Archived from the original on 16 June 2023. Retrieved 16 June 2023.
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