Ilya is the chief scientist at OpenAI and a Board member. He is Israeli-Canadian. His focus is to prevent artificial superintelligence which can outmatch humans. Sutskever was born in Soviet Russia. He has, however, been reared up in Jerusalem since he was five. He studied at University of Toronto, Canada with Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneer of AI. Hinton was in Google. He left the company early 2023 to warn the world about the perils of generative AI. It should be noted that Hinton, and his two graduate students, one of them being Sutskever, developed a neural network in 2021 to identify objects in photos. The software was called AlexNet. It worked by recognizing patterns. Google acquired Hinton’s startup DNNresearch. Google hired Sutskever where he extended the ability of pattern recognition of images to pattern recognition for words and sentences.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, noticed Sutskever, and at his instance he left Google and co-founded OpenAI in 2015 along with Musk. Later Musk fell out with OpenAI which tended to be a with-profit company accepting heavy investment from Microsoft.

At OpenAI Sutskever contributed significantly to the development of LLMs including GPT-2, GPT-3 and DALL-E ( text-to-image). In 2022, they released a conversational bot called ChatGPT.

Sutskever had concerns about the potential perils of AI, especially about superintelligence. He had disagreements with Altman about the pace of introducing AI products, since there were issues of safety. He was concerned about superintelligence going rogue, no matter who built it.

Sutskever tended to think in terms of aligning the development of AI with ethical principles. He wanted this superalignment for superintelligence too.