SAN FRANCISCO, July 8 — Ilya Sutskever, the computer scientist who cofounded OpenAI and helped spark the deep learning revolution, remains the company’s Chief Scientist as of today, after a boardroom drama that briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman. The figure that matters: Sutskever has published over 50 papers that have accumulated over 200,000 citations. His 2012 AlexNet paper, co-authored with Alex Krizhevsky and his PhD advisor Geoffrey Hinton, won the ImageNet competition and is widely credited with igniting the modern AI boom.
Born in 1986 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, Sutskever moved to Israel as a child. He earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2013 under Hinton.
That same year, he received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Sutskever joined Google Brain as a research scientist in 2013. Two years later, he cofounded OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and others.
The MIT Technology Review named him one of its Innovators Under 35 in 2015. By the numbers, his technical fingerprints are all over OpenAI’s core breakthroughs.
He was instrumental in developing GPT-1 in 2018, GPT-2 in 2019, and GPT-3 in 2020. He also led the team that produced the scaling laws paper — Kaplan et al., 2020 — which gave the industry a mathematical framework for how model performance improves with more data, compute, and parameters. Sutskever also spearheaded the development of reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, in 2022.
That technique is the secret sauce behind ChatGPT’s ability to follow instructions and produce coherent, helpful responses. His research focus extends beyond raw capability. Sutskever has long emphasized deep learning, reinforcement learning, and AI safety — the question of how to ensure increasingly powerful systems remain under human control.
The November 2023 board coup
In November 2023, Sutskever was part of the OpenAI board that voted to fire Sam Altman as CEO. The decision sent shockwaves through the tech industry and triggered an employee revolt. Days later, Sutskever reversed course and helped reinstate Altman.
The episode remains one of the most dramatic in Silicon Valley history. Sutskever publicly expressed regret over his role.
He has not spoken extensively about the incident since, and his current relationship with Altman is not a matter of public record. Today, Sutskever continues in his role as Chief Scientist, the same title he held before and after the upheaval. OpenAI has since restructured its board and governance, but Sutskever’s position at the research helm has not changed.
What comes next
The bottom line: Sutskever remains one of the most cited and influential researchers in artificial intelligence. His work on scaling laws and RLHF underpins the current generation of large language models. As OpenAI pushes toward artificial general intelligence, his voice on safety will matter.
For now, the cofounder and chief scientist stays put. The question that lingers: what role will he play in OpenAI’s next chapter, and in the broader effort to steer AI toward outcomes that are not just powerful, but safe.
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