Ilya Sutskever facts for kids

Ilya Sutskever (born December 8, 1986) is a computer scientist from Canada and Israel. He is known for his work in machine learning, which is about teaching computers to learn from data.

Sutskever has made important contributions to a field called deep learning. This is a type of machine learning inspired by how the human brain works. He helped create AlexNet, a special computer program that is very good at recognizing images.

He also helped start OpenAI, a company focused on artificial intelligence (AI). He was their chief scientist, meaning he was the top scientist there. In 2023, he was part of a group that removed Sam Altman from his role as CEO of OpenAI. Sam Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever left the board. In June 2024, Sutskever started a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.

Early Life and Education

Ilya Sutskever was born in 1986 in a city called Gorky in the Soviet Union (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia). When he was 5, his family moved to Jerusalem, Israel. They lived there until he was 16, then moved to Canada.

He studied at the Open University of Israel from 2000 to 2002. After moving to Canada, he went to the University of Toronto. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 2005. He then got a master's degree in computer science in 2007 and a PhD in computer science in 2013. His main teacher and mentor was Geoffrey Hinton, a famous computer scientist.

In 2012, Sutskever worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky to build AlexNet. To make AlexNet work, he bought many powerful computer parts called GPUs online.

Career and Research

Ilya Sutskever (second from right) at Stanford University in 2014

In 2012, Sutskever spent a couple of months at Stanford University working with Andrew Ng, another well-known AI expert. He then went back to the University of Toronto. He joined a new research company called DNNResearch, which was started from Geoffrey Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google bought DNNResearch and hired Sutskever to work at Google Brain. Google Brain is a research team at Google that focuses on AI.

At Google Brain, Sutskever helped create a learning method called "sequence-to-sequence." This method helps AI convert one sequence of information into another, like translating a sentence from one language to another. He also worked on TensorFlow, a tool for building AI systems. He was also one of the many people who helped write the research paper about AlphaGo, an AI that became famous for beating human champions at the game Go.

At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google. He became a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, a new organization focused on developing AI.

Sutskever played a very important role in creating ChatGPT, a popular AI chatbot. In 2023, he announced a new project at OpenAI called "Superalignment." This project aims to make sure that very smart AI systems, called superintelligences, are safe and helpful to humans. He believes that superintelligence, which is AI much smarter than people, could become a reality within this decade.

Sutskever was one of the six board members of the non-profit group that oversees OpenAI. In November 2023, the board removed Sam Altman from his CEO role. They said he wasn't always clear in his talks with the board. Some people thought this decision was partly because of disagreements about how much the company should focus on AI safety. Sutskever later said he regretted being part of the decision to remove Altman. After this event, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board.

In May 2024, Sutskever announced he was leaving OpenAI. He said he wanted to work on a new project that was very important to him personally. His departure came after a difficult time at OpenAI with leadership changes and discussions about how AI should be developed and kept safe.

In June 2024, Sutskever announced his new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. He started it with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. The company has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. Unlike OpenAI, which creates products that make money, Sutskever said his new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence." This means their only goal is to create a super-smart AI that is completely safe. In September 2024, the company announced it had raised $1 billion from big investment firms.

In October 2024, after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton supported Sutskever's decision to remove Altman. Hinton stressed his concerns about AI safety.

Awards and Honors

• In 2015, MIT Technology Review named Sutskever one of the top 35 innovators under 35 years old.
• In 2018, he was a main speaker at important technology conferences like Nvidia Ntech 2018 and AI Frontiers Conference 2018.
• In 2022, he was chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), which is a very high honor for scientists in the United Kingdom.