All people
AI era (2012-present)
Ilya Sutskever
born 1985
Co-author of AlexNet; co-founder of OpenAI; founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Contributions
- 01PhD student under Hinton; co-led AlexNet (2012).
- 02Chief Scientist of OpenAI through the GPT-3 / GPT-4 era.
- 03Left OpenAI in 2024 to found Safe Superintelligence (SSI), focused on a single product line.
Why it matters for scaling laws
Sutskever's intuition that scale plus next-token prediction would produce general capability is the single highest-EV technical bet of the last decade. SSI's founding is one of the cleanest experiments in alignment-first model development underway.