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Ilya Sutskever
CEO and co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Ilya Sutskever is co-founder and chief executive of Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the research lab he launched in June 2024 with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. The company states that it has “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.”
Sutskever is one of the most cited researchers in deep learning. In 2012 he co-created AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, the image-recognition network that helped trigger the modern deep learning era. Google acquired their company, DNNResearch, in 2013, and he worked at Google Brain, where he contributed to sequence-to-sequence learning and TensorFlow.
He co-founded OpenAI at the end of 2015 and served as its chief scientist, leading research that produced the GPT series, ChatGPT and early reasoning models. In July 2023 he co-led the launch of OpenAI’s Superalignment effort, which set out to solve the alignment of Super Intelligence within four years. He left OpenAI in May 2024.
At SSI, Sutskever initially held the role of chief scientist. In July 2025, after Gross departed for Meta, he became CEO with Levy as President and wrote that the technical team reports to him. In July 2026 SSI announced a long-term partnership with NVIDIA, including an investment and access to the Vera Rubin platform; Sutskever said the lab had “research that is worthy of scaling up.”
His honours include fellowship of the Royal Society, multiple NeurIPS Test of Time awards, and the 2026 National Academy of Sciences Award for the Industrial Application of Science.