Just weeks before the management shakeup at OpenAI rocked Silicon Valley and made international news, the company’s cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever explored the transformative potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), highlighting how it could surpass human intelligence and profoundly transform every aspect of life. Hear his take on the promises and perils of AGI — and his optimistic case for how unprecedented collaboration will ensure its safe and beneficial development. (Recorded October 17, 2023)

Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever FRS (Hebrew: ????? ??????; Russian: ???? ????????; /ilja su:?k?v?r/ born 1985/86)^[4] is a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist working in machine learning,^[1] who co-founded and serves as board member^[7] and Chief Scientist of OpenAI.^[8]

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.^[9] Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.^[10]

Career and research

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.^[20]

At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm,^[21] and worked on TensorFlow.^[22]

At the end of 2015, he left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.^[23][24][25]

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.^[26]

Sutskever is one of the six board members of the non-profit entity which controls OpenAI.^[7] The Information speculated that the firing in part resulted from a conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.^[27] In a company all-hands shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever stated that firing Altman was “the board doing its duty”,^[28] though in the following week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman’s ouster.^[29] The firing of Altman and resignation of Brockman led to resignation of 3 senior researchers from OpenAI.^[30]

Awards and honours

• 2015, Sutskever was named in MIT Technology Review‘s 35 Innovators Under 35.^[31]
• 2018, Sutskever was the keynote speaker at Nvidia Ntech 2018^[32] and AI Frontiers Conference 2018.^[33]
• 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).^[21]