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Ilya Sutskever

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Ilya Sutskever
FRS
איליה סוצקבר‎
Илья Суцкевер
Born
Илья́ Ефи́мович Суцке́вер
Ilya Efimovich Sutskever

(1986-12-08) 8 December 1986 (age 38)
Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union[3][4]
CitizenshipCanadian, Israeli[5]
Alma materOpen University of Israel
University of Toronto (BS, MS, PhD)
Known forAlexNet
Co-founding OpenAI
Founding SSI Inc.
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
Google Brain
OpenAI
ThesisTraining Recurrent Neural Networks (2013)
Doctoral advisorGeoffrey Hinton[1][2]
Websitewww.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/ Edit this at Wikidata

Ilya Sutskever FRS (born 8 December 1986) is a Canadian-Israeli-Russian computer scientist who specializes in machine learning.[6]

Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning.[7][8][9] He is notably the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.[10]

Sutskever co-founded and is a former chief scientist at OpenAI.[11] In 2023, he was one of the members of OpenAI's board that ousted Sam Altman from his position as CEO; Altman returned a week later, and Sutskever stepped down from the board. In June 2024, Sutskever co-founded the company Safe Superintelligence with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy.[12][13]

Early life and education

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Sutskever was born into a Jewish family[14] in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (then Gorky, Soviet Union). At the age of 5, he made aliyah with his family and lived in Jerusalem, Israel,[15][16] until he was 16, when his family moved to Canada.[17] Sutskever attended the Open University of Israel from 2000 to 2002.[18] After moving to Canada, he attended the University of Toronto in Ontario.[18]

Sutskever received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 2005,[18][19][4][20] a Master of Science in computer science in 2007,[19][21] and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 2013.[2][22][23] His doctoral supervisor was Geoffrey Hinton.[1]

In 2012, Sutskever built AlexNet in collaboration with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. To support AlexNet's computing demands, he bought many GTX 580 GPUs online.[24]

Career and research

[edit]
Sutskever (second from right) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2014

In 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the University of Toronto and joined Hinton's new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton's research group. In 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.[25]

At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm,[26] and worked on TensorFlow.[27] He is also one of the AlphaGo paper's many co-authors.[28]

At the end of 2015, Sutskever left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI.[29][30][31]

Sutskever is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.[32][33] In 2023, he announced that he would co-lead OpenAI's new "Superalignment" project, which is trying to solve the alignment of superintelligences within four years. He wrote that even if superintelligence seems far off, it could happen this decade.[34]

Sutskever was formerly one of the six board members of the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI.[35] On November 17, 2023, the board fired Sam Altman, saying that "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board".[36] The Information speculated that the decision was partly driven by conflict over the extent to which the company should commit to AI safety.[37] In an all-hands company meeting shortly after the board meeting, Sutskever said that firing Altman was "the board doing its duty",[38] but the next week, he expressed regret at having participated in Altman's ouster.[39] Altman's firing and OpenAI's co-founder Greg Brockman's resignation led three senior researchers to resign from OpenAI.[40] After that, Sutskever stepped down from the OpenAI board.[41] After that, he was absent from OpenAI's office. Some sources suggested he was leading the team remotely, while others said he no longer had access to the team's work.[42]

In May 2024, Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI to focus on a new project that was "very personally meaningful" to him. His decision followed a turbulent period at OpenAI marked by leadership crises and internal debates about the direction of AI development and alignment protocols. Jan Leike, the other leader of the superalignment project, announced his departure hours later, citing an erosion of safety and trust in OpenAI's leadership.[43]

In June 2024, Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new company he founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.[44] In contrast to OpenAI, which releases revenue-generating products, Sutskever said the new company's "first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then".[13] In September 2024, the company announced that it had raised $1 billion from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel.[45]

In an October 2024 interview after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Geoffrey Hinton expressed support for Sutskever's decision to fire Altman, emphasizing concerns about AI safety.[46][47]

Awards and honors

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References

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  1. ^ a b Ilya Sutskever at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Edit this at Wikidata
  2. ^ a b Sutskever, Ilya (2013). Training Recurrent Neural Networks. utoronto.ca (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/36012. OCLC 889910425. ProQuest 1501655550. Archived from the original on 26 March 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  3. ^ "Heard It Through the AI | University of Toronto Magazine". University of Toronto Magazine. 28 September 2022. Archived from the original on 29 May 2023. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  4. ^ a b "Season 1 Ep. 22 Ilya Sutskever". The Robot Brains Podcast. 21 September 2021. Archived from the original on 1 May 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022 – via YouTube.
  5. ^ "OpenAI's Israeli co-founder departs as US gears up regulation". Jewish News Syndicate. 17 May 2024.
  6. ^ Ilya Sutskever publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  7. ^ Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Hinton, Geoffrey E (2012). "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 25. Curran Associates, Inc.
  8. ^ Srivastava, Nitish; Hinton, Geoffrey; Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Salakhutdinov, Ruslan (2014). "Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting". Journal of Machine Learning Research. 15 (56): 1929–1958. ISSN 1533-7928.
  9. ^ Sutskever, Ilya; Vinyals, Oriol; Le, Quoc V. (8 December 2014). "Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks". Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2. NIPS'14. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press: 3104–3112. arXiv:1409.3215.
  10. ^ Alex Krizhevsky; Ilya Sutskever; Geoffrey E. Hinton (24 May 2017). "ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks". Communications of the ACM. 60 (6): 84–90. doi:10.1145/3065386. ISSN 0001-0782. Wikidata Q59445836.
  11. ^ Metz, Cade (19 April 2018). "A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 1 March 2023. Retrieved 22 October 2018.
  12. ^ "Safe Superintelligence Inc". SSI. 19 June 2024. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  13. ^ a b Vance, Ashlee (19 June 2024). "Ilya Sutskever Has a New Plan for Safe Superintelligence". Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved 19 June 2024.
  14. ^ Titcomb, James (16 May 2024). "How ChatGPT's Russian-born genius sealed his fate after a shocking coup". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 29 September 2024.
  15. ^ מן, יובל (18 November 2022). ""הבינה המלאכותית מהמדע הבדיוני תהפוך למציאות"". Ynet (in Hebrew). Archived from the original on 18 April 2023. Retrieved 18 April 2023.
  16. ^ Wrobel, Sharon (20 June 2024). "OpenAI co-founder creates a new AI startup with a research lab in Tel Aviv". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 29 September 2024.
  17. ^ Ansari, Tasmia (7 March 2023). "The Brain That Supercharged ChatGPT, ImageNet and TF". Analytics India Magazine. Archived from the original on 14 March 2023. Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  18. ^ a b c "Neural networking". The Varsity. 25 October 2010. Archived from the original on 8 June 2020. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  19. ^ a b Johnston, Jessica Leigh (8 December 2010). "A Neural Network for a New Millennium". University of Toronto Magazine. Archived from the original on 14 April 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  20. ^ Ilya Sutskever on LinkedIn Edit this at Wikidata
  21. ^ Sutskever, Ilya (2007). Nonlinear multilayered sequence models. utoronto.ca (MSc thesis). University of Toronto. hdl:1807/119676. OCLC 234120052. Archived from the original on 24 March 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2023.
  22. ^ "RAM Workshop". thespermwhale.com. Archived from the original on 5 December 2022. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  23. ^ "Episode 85: A Conversation with Ilya Sutskever". Voices in AI. Gigaom. Archived from the original on 22 March 2023. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  24. ^ "Exclusive: Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, on his hopes and fears for the future of AI". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 1 November 2023. Retrieved 1 November 2023.
  25. ^ McMillan, Robert (13 March 2013). "Google Hires Brains that Helped Supercharge Machine Learning". wired.com. Archived from the original on 16 June 2018. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  26. ^ a b Anon (2022). "Ilya Sutskever". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 15 March 2023. Retrieved 12 May 2022.
  27. ^ Martín Abadi; Ashish Agarwal; Paul Barham; et al. (16 March 2016). TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems (PDF). arXiv:1603.04467. Wikidata Q29040034.
  28. ^ David Silver; Aja Huang; Chris J. Maddison; et al. (27 January 2016). "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search". Nature. 529 (7587): 484–489. doi:10.1038/NATURE16961. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 26819042. Wikidata Q28005460.
  29. ^ "OpenAI Blog". 12 December 2015. Archived from the original on 6 October 2021. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  30. ^ www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/ Edit this at Wikidata
  31. ^ Metz, Cade (27 April 2016). "Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk's Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free". wire.com. Archived from the original on 27 April 2016. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  32. ^ Ansari, Tasmia (7 March 2023). "The Brain That Supercharged ChatGPT, ImageNet and TF". AIM. Retrieved 17 May 2024.
  33. ^ Heaven, Will Douglas (2 May 2023). "Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he's now scared of the tech he helped build". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 17 May 2024.
  34. ^ "Introducing Superalignment". openai.com. Archived from the original on 14 July 2023. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  35. ^ "Our structure". Archived from the original on 29 July 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023. OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, composed of OpenAI Global, LLC employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner.
  36. ^ Metz, Cade (17 November 2023). "OpenAI's Board Pushes Out Sam Altman, Its High-Profile C.E.O." The New York Times.
  37. ^ "Before OpenAI Ousted Altman, Employees Disagreed Over AI 'Safety'". The Information. Archived from the original on 18 November 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  38. ^ Edwards, Benj (18 November 2023). "Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 19 November 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  39. ^ Rosenberg, Scott (20 November 2023). "OpenAI's Sutskever says he regrets board's firing of Altman". Axios. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  40. ^ Thompson, Polly. "3 senior OpenAI researchers resign in the wake of Sam Altman's shock dismissal as CEO, report says". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 18 November 2023. Retrieved 18 November 2023.
  41. ^ "OpenAI announces return of Sam Altman as CEO". 22 November 2023.
  42. ^ Kahn, Jeremy (21 May 2024). "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat the most dangerous kind of AI—but never delivered, sources say". Fortune. Retrieved 22 May 2024.
  43. ^ Samuel, Sigal (17 May 2024). ""I lost trust": Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded". Vox. Retrieved 18 May 2024.
  44. ^ Tabassum, Juveria (19 June 2024). "Former OpenAI chief scientist to start a new AI company". Reuters.
  45. ^ Kai, Kenrick; Hu, Krystal; Tong, Anna (4 September 2024). "OpenAI co-founder Sutskever's new safety-focused AI startup SSI raises $1 billion". reuters.com. Retrieved 4 September 2024.
  46. ^ Hetzner, Christiaan. "New Nobel Prize winner, AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton, says he's proud his student fired OpenAI boss Sam Altman". Fortune. Retrieved 12 October 2024.
  47. ^ Tan, Kwan Wei Kevin. "The Nobel Prize-winning 'godfather of AI' says he's glad one of his students had a hand in ousting Sam Altman from OpenAI". Business Insider. Retrieved 12 October 2024.
  48. ^ "35 Innovators Under 35: Ilya Sutskever". technologyreview.com. Archived from the original on 4 May 2019. Retrieved 17 July 2016.
  49. ^ Martin, Scott (15 September 2018). "Reinforcement Learning 'Really Works' for AI Against Pro Gamers, OpenAI Trailblazer Says". Nvidia Blog. Nvidia. Archived from the original on 28 March 2023. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
  50. ^ "The man who revolutionized computer vision, machine translation, games and robotics · AI Frontiers Conference". aifrontiers.com. Archived from the original on 16 June 2023. Retrieved 16 June 2023.
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