Ilya SutskeverIlya Sutskever

Born 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Immigrated to Israel at age 5 (grew up in Jerusalem), attended the Open University of Israel. Moved to Canada at 16 and was so advanced that after only one month of Canadian high school, he was admitted to the University of Toronto as a third-year undergraduate. Earned BS in Mathematics (2005), MS (2007), and PhD (2013), all at U of T under Geoffrey Hinton. Co-authored AlexNet (2012) and the sequence-to-sequence paper (2014). Did a brief postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford (2012), then joined Google Brain via the DNNResearch acquisition (2013). Co-founded OpenAI in 2015, serving as Chief Scientist and key architect of the GPT series. Participated in the Sam Altman board ouster (Nov 2023) but later expressed regret. Departed OpenAI in May 2024 and co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) in June 2024. SSI raised $1B at a $5B valuation (Sept 2024), then $2B more at a $32B valuation (April 2025, led by Greenoaks with ~$500M, alongside a16z, Lightspeed, DST, Alphabet and Nvidia), all with no released product and roughly 20 staff, a pure bet on Sutskever's track record.