Ilya Sutskever
Computer scientist who co-created AlexNet, co-founded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist, played a central and later-regretted role in the November 2023 board vote to remove Sam Altman, and in 2024 left to found the AI-safety company Safe Superintelligence Inc.
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- Location
- Palo Alto, California, United States
- Country
- United States
- Background
- Born in Russia, raised in Israel, emigrated to Canada with his family as a teenager
- Education
- University of Toronto — honours B.Sc. in mathematics (2005); M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science (Ph.D. 2013), supervised by Geoffrey Hinton
- Known for
- Co-creator of AlexNet (2012); co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI; co-founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc.
- Current role
- Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (since June 2024)
- Reported OpenAI equity stake
- About $7 billion, per his own May 2026 court testimony in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI
Overview
Ilya Sutskever is a computer scientist who co-created the AlexNet neural network in 2012, co-founded the artificial intelligence company OpenAI in 2015 and served as its chief scientist, and in 2024 left to found Safe Superintelligence Inc., a company devoted solely to developing safe superintelligent AI (University of Toronto; TechCrunch, June 2024). He was one of the OpenAI board members who voted in November 2023 to remove Sam Altman as chief executive, a decision he publicly said he came to regret within days (Axios; Fortune).
According to the University of Toronto, Sutskever was born in Russia, raised in Israel, and emigrated to Canada with his family as a teenager (University of Toronto).
Education and early career
Sutskever was admitted directly into the University of Toronto’s mathematics program and graduated with an honours Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 2005. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in computer science at the same university, supervised by Geoffrey Hinton — later a University Professor Emeritus and 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate (University of Toronto). His doctoral research applied neural networks to language modeling; the university describes it as producing “a program that used neural networks…to learn about language and generate text — a crude forerunner to ChatGPT” (University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science). His dissertation, “Training Recurrent Neural Networks,” is dated 2013 and lists Hinton as supervisor (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto).
In 2012, while still a graduate student, Sutskever worked with Hinton and fellow graduate student Alex Krizhevsky to develop AlexNet, a convolutional neural network that won that year’s ImageNet computer-vision competition by a wide margin (University of Toronto; University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science). Sutskever and Hinton subsequently co-founded a company, DNNResearch, which was acquired by Google; Sutskever then worked as a research scientist at Google Brain, where he contributed to training the AlphaGo game-playing system and co-developed sequence-to-sequence neural network models used in machine translation (University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science).
OpenAI
In 2015, Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, initially serving as its research director and later as chief scientist (University of Toronto).
The November 2023 board crisis
On November 17, 2023, Sutskever voted with OpenAI’s board to remove Sam Altman as chief executive (Axios). Fortune’s contemporaneous reporting described him as the board’s “ringleader” in that decision, driven by concern that Altman was pushing the pace of AI development too far, too fast (Fortune). According to his own account, given in May 2026 trial testimony, he had spent roughly a year gathering material documenting what he considered a “consistent pattern of lying” by Altman before the vote (Associated Press via WTVB). That same testimony indicated OpenAI’s board, after removing Altman, discussed a possible merger with rival AI company Anthropic — a proposal Sutskever said he was “not excited” about (Associated Press via WTVB).
By his own later account, described in 2026 trial testimony, Sutskever largely avoided the internet over the weekend immediately following the vote, and so missed Microsoft’s offer to hire OpenAI’s staff and the rapid spread of an employee letter demanding the board’s resignation (Business Insider via Yahoo Finance). On November 20, 2023, he posted a public statement of regret on X: “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company” (Fortune; Axios). Around the same time, an employee letter demanding the board’s resignation and Altman’s reinstatement was already circulating and gathering signatures (Fortune); within days of the original vote, Sutskever himself signed it (CNN; TechBuzz.ai). Altman was reinstated as CEO on November 21, 2023, under a reconstituted board, and Sutskever returned to the company alongside him (CNN).
More than two years later, testifying in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Sutskever stood by his original vote even as he had reversed it in practice, telling the court, “I didn’t want it to be destroyed” (TechBuzz.ai).
Departure
On May 14, 2024, Sutskever announced he was leaving OpenAI: “After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial…I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time” (TechCrunch). Sam Altman responded, “This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. OpenAI would not be what it is without him” (TechCrunch). Research director Jakub Pachocki, who Bloomberg reported had effectively been performing the chief scientist role since the previous November, took over the title (Bloomberg). CNN described the departure as ending “months of speculation in Silicon Valley” about Sutskever’s future at the company following his role in the Altman ouster (CNN).
Safe Superintelligence Inc.
On June 19, 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), co-founded with Daniel Gross, a former Y Combinator partner, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI engineer, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv (TechCrunch). Unlike OpenAI’s original nonprofit structure, SSI was set up as a for-profit company from its founding. Its announcement described a singular focus: “SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is the sole focus” (TechCrunch).
SSI raised $1 billion in its first funding round, announced September 4, 2024, at a reported $5 billion valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital among the lead investors (PitchBook; Crunchbase News). In April 2025, the company raised a further round reported at $2 billion, led by Greenoaks Capital Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST Global, Alphabet and Nvidia, at a reported $32 billion valuation — roughly six times its valuation seven months earlier (CTech; Yahoo Finance, citing Reuters). As of that report, SSI had released no public product, model or technical demonstration (CTech).
Testifying in May 2026 in the federal trial of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Sutskever said his OpenAI equity stake — separate from his position at SSI — was worth about $5 billion as of November 2025 and about $7 billion at the time of his testimony (Associated Press via WTVB).
What this profile does not claim
This profile does not state a precise birth date or birthplace for Sutskever beyond “born in Russia, raised in Israel,” as given by the University of Toronto; no more specific detail was found in a source read for this profile. It does not adopt a single figure for how many OpenAI employees signed the November 2023 letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement, since reported figures vary across outlets. It does not assert a specific date on which Sutskever signed that letter, only that it followed his November 20, 2023 public statement of regret and preceded Altman’s November 21 reinstatement. On Safe Superintelligence’s April 2025 funding round, this profile states the $2 billion figure corroborated by multiple independent outlets and Reuters-sourced reporting, while noting that PYMNTS separately reported the round as $6 billion — a discrepancy this profile flags rather than silently resolves. It does not evaluate the truth of Sutskever’s own allegations, made in 2026 trial testimony, about Altman’s conduct, or of any other party’s account of the same events; it reports only that the allegations and testimony were made, as covered by wire-service and business press. Finally, it does not assert Sutskever’s personal country of residence or citizenship as of this profile’s last update; the “country” field above reflects the jurisdiction of his most recently documented professional base rather than a citizenship claim.
Timeline
- 2005
- Graduates from the University of Toronto with an honours Bachelor of Science in mathematics.
- 2012
- Co-creates AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto; the convolutional neural network wins the ImageNet competition by a wide margin.
- 2013
- Completes his Ph.D. thesis, "Training Recurrent Neural Networks," under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.
- 2015-12
- Co-founds OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab, serving as research director and later chief scientist.
- 2023-11-17
- Votes with OpenAI's board to remove Sam Altman as chief executive.
- 2023-11-20
- Posts a public statement of regret on X, and around this time signs an employee letter demanding the board's resignation and Altman's reinstatement.
- 2023-11-21
- Returns to OpenAI as Sam Altman is reinstated as CEO under a reconstituted board.
- 2024-05-14
- Announces his departure from OpenAI after almost a decade with the company.
- 2024-06-19
- Co-founds Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, a for-profit AI-safety company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.
- 2024-09-04
- Safe Superintelligence Inc. raises $1 billion in funding at a reported $5 billion valuation.
- 2025-04
- Safe Superintelligence Inc. raises a further $2 billion, reportedly led by Greenoaks Capital Partners with participation from Alphabet and Nvidia, at a reported $32 billion valuation.
- 2026-05-11
- Testifies in the federal trial of Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, disclosing an OpenAI equity stake he values at about $7 billion and describing his own actions during the November 2023 board crisis.
What we could not verify
These claims came up in research and could not be confirmed. They are recorded here rather than published as fact or quietly dropped. If you hold a source that settles one, please tell us.
- No source read for this profile gives a precise birth date or birth city; the University of Toronto's own account states only that Sutskever was born in Russia, raised in Israel, and emigrated to Canada with his family as a teenager.
- Sources disagree on the size of Safe Superintelligence's April 2025 funding round: TechCrunch, CTech, Crunchbase-adjacent industry press and Reuters-sourced reporting (via Yahoo Finance) consistently give $2 billion raised at a $32 billion valuation, while PYMNTS reported it as "$6 billion in new funding" at the same $32 billion valuation. This profile states the widely corroborated $2 billion figure and flags PYMNTS's figure as an outlier rather than silently adopting either without comment.
- Sources describe Sutskever's reversal from voting to remove Altman to signing the employee letter demanding his reinstatement as happening within days of November 17, 2023, but no source read for this profile pins the letter-signing to a single exact date; this profile states only that it followed his November 20, 2023 public statement of regret and preceded Altman's November 21 reinstatement.
- Reporting on how many OpenAI employees signed the November 2023 reinstatement letter varies by outlet (figures from roughly 500 of 700-plus staff up to 95–97% of the company are reported across different sources); this profile does not adopt one specific figure.
- This profile does not evaluate or verify Sutskever's own account, given in May 2026 trial testimony, of a "consistent pattern of lying" by Altman; it reports only that he made this allegation and that a memo existed, as described in wire-service coverage of the trial, without asserting the underlying claims are true.
- Beyond the reported California location of Safe Superintelligence's Palo Alto office, no source read for this profile confirms Sutskever's personal country of residence as of this profile's last update; "country" above reflects the jurisdiction of his most recent, best-documented professional base rather than a claim about his citizenship or domicile.
Sources
17 sources (9 tier 1, 8 tier 2), each opened and read against the claim it supports. Every source is independent of the subject; no first-party material is cited. See the source policy.
Built from the University of Toronto's own account of Sutskever's education and early career (independent of OpenAI or SSI), his original Ph.D. dissertation, contemporaneous November 2023 reporting (Axios, Fortune) on the OpenAI board crisis, 2024 reporting on his departure (Bloomberg, CNN, TechCrunch), and 2025–2026 reporting on Safe Superintelligence Inc.'s funding and his May 2026 trial testimony (Bloomberg, Forbes, wire-service coverage). Every source below was independently fetched and read for this profile; none of the sourcing was copied from this site's existing OpenAI, Sam Altman or Greg Brockman profiles, though the same public events are necessarily covered by all of them.
- Ilya Sutskever, a leader in AI and its responsible development, receives U of T honorary degree Supports: Early life (born in Russia, raised in Israel, emigrated to Canada as a teenager), his 2005 undergraduate degree, his M.Sc./Ph.D. under Geoffrey Hinton, his 2012 co-creation of AlexNet, his move to Google (via DNNResearch) and Google Brain, and his 2015 co-founding of OpenAI as research director and later chief scientist.
- Ilya Sutskever, a leader in AI and its responsible development, receives U of T honorary degree (department page) Supports: Corroborating detail on his Ph.D. research topic, the 2012 AlexNet collaboration with Krizhevsky and Hinton, the DNNResearch acquisition by Google, his Google Brain work on AlphaGo training and sequence-to-sequence machine translation models, and his 2015 OpenAI co-founding.
- Training Recurrent Neural Networks (Ph.D. thesis) Supports: Confirming the exact thesis title, its 2013 completion date, and Geoffrey Hinton as supervisor.
- OpenAI's Sutskever says he regrets board's firing of Altman Supports: Confirming Sutskever's role on the board that removed Altman on November 17, 2023, and his November 20, 2023 public statement of regret.
- Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder, deeply regrets ousting Altman, will do 'everything I can' to reunite the company Supports: His exact quote of regret ("I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions...I never intended to harm OpenAI"), his description as the board's "ringleader," and the contemporaneous report that an employee letter demanding the board's resignation, threatening mass resignations to Microsoft, was already circulating and gathering signatures.
- OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever Is Leaving the Company Supports: The May 14, 2024 departure announcement, his chief scientist/co-founder title, his replacement by research director Jakub Pachocki, and confirmation that this ended months of speculation about his future at the company after "playing a key role" in the November 2023 ouster of Altman.
- OpenAI executive Ilya Sutskever is out after key role in CEO Sam Altman's ouster Supports: Confirming the sequence of his November 2023 actions — voting to fire Altman, then signing an employee letter demanding the board's resignation and Altman's return within days, then publicly apologizing after Altman's reinstatement — and Sam Altman's own statement on Sutskever's May 2024 departure.
- Alphabet and Nvidia invest in AI startup SSI at $32bn Supports: Independent corroboration of the $32 billion valuation, Greenoaks Capital Partners as lead investor, and Alphabet and Nvidia as investors in the round.
- Former OpenAI executive Sutskever discloses nearly $7 billion stake in AI firm Supports: His May 11, 2026 trial testimony disclosing an OpenAI equity stake he valued at about $5 billion in November 2025 and about $7 billion at the time of testimony; his account of spending roughly a year gathering material on an alleged "consistent pattern of lying" by Altman before the November 2023 vote; and his testimony that OpenAI's board discussed a potential merger with Anthropic after Altman's removal, which he said he was "not excited" about.
- OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, longtime chief scientist, departs Supports: Sutskever's own resignation statement ("After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI...a project that is very personally meaningful to me") and Sam Altman's response quote.
- OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announces his new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence Supports: The June 19, 2024 founding of Safe Superintelligence Inc., co-founders Daniel Gross (former Y Combinator partner) and Daniel Levy (former OpenAI engineer), its Palo Alto/Tel Aviv offices, its for-profit structure from inception, and its stated single-minded mission ("SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap").
- OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever and super-angel Daniel Gross land $1B for AI safety Supports: The September 4, 2024 $1 billion funding round at a reported $5 billion valuation.
- AI's Big Day — Startup Safe Superintelligence Raises $1B At Reported $5B Valuation Supports: Independent corroboration of the $1 billion/$5 billion September 2024 round and its lead investors (Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital).
- Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence raises $2B at $32B valuation—with no product yet Supports: The April 2025 $2 billion round at a $32 billion valuation, lead investor Greenoaks, other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, DST Global, Alphabet and Nvidia, and confirmation the company had released no public product at that point.
- OpenAI Co-Founder's Firm Value Jumps Sixfold After $6 Billion Funding Round Supports: Recording this outlet's figure of "$6 billion in new funding," used here only to document a source disagreement with the more widely corroborated $2 billion figure (see openItems), not as the basis for a stated fact.
- Ilya Sutskever voted to fire Sam Altman. He avoided the internet in the aftermath. Supports: Detail on Sutskever's own May 2026 trial testimony about the November 2023 weekend: that he "pretty much" avoided the internet after voting to remove Altman, missed Microsoft's hiring offer and the staff letter as they developed, and only reversed his position afterward, saying "I felt that, had I not done this, the company would be destroyed."
- Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman's OpenAI Ouster: 'I Didn't Want It to Be Destroyed' Supports: Confirming, from the same May 2026 trial testimony, that Sutskever signed the employee letter demanding Altman's return, and his direct quote defending his original vote: "I didn't want it to be destroyed."
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