Ilya Sutskever is co-founder and chief executive of Safe Superintelligence, a lab reportedly valued at $32 billion that has shipped no product. He co-created AlexNet, co-founded OpenAI, contributed to its GPT models and led the research behind its reasoning models.
Sutskever was born in 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod, then Gorky, in the Soviet Union, and grew up in Jerusalem after his family moved to Israel when he was five. In eighth grade he started taking classes at the Open University of Israel. At 16 he moved to Canada and was admitted to the University of Toronto as a third-year undergraduate, earning a bachelor's in mathematics in 2005, a master's in computer science in 2007 and a PhD in 2013 under Geoffrey Hinton.
In 2012 he built AlexNet, a convolutional neural network, with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. After about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford, he joined Hinton's spinoff DNNResearch, which Google bought in 2013, making him a research scientist at Google Brain. There he worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le on sequence-to-sequence learning, worked on TensorFlow, and was a co-author of the AlphaGo paper.
At the end of 2015 he left Google to co-found OpenAI as chief scientist. He is credited with its scaling approach, a key role in ChatGPT and the research behind reasoning models such as o1. In 2023 he co-led its “Superalignment” project. As one of six board members, he voted in November 2023 to fire Sam Altman, then said he regretted it; Altman returned a week later and Sutskever left the board. He left OpenAI in May 2024.
In June 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, saying its first product would be safe superintelligence and nothing else. It raised $1 billion in September 2024 and $2 billion in March 2025 at a reported $32 billion valuation. In June 2025 it turned down a purchase offer from Meta, and Sutskever became chief executive after Gross left for Meta. In July 2026 Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion. In September 2026 The Inference cited one account that the lab has raised roughly $8 billion and shipped nothing.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
