Ilya Sutskever: AlexNet & ChatGPT Co-Creator Who Fired Altman

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Ilya Sutskever is the co-founder of OpenAI and its former chief scientist, co-author of AlexNet - the 2012 paper that launched the deep learning revolution - and the man who voted to fire Sam Altman in November 2023, only to regret it a week later. Since 2024, he has been building Safe Superintelligence, a company that promises not to release any product before achieving “safe superintelligence.” Facts checked September 18, 2026.

From Jerusalem to Hinton’s Lab

He was born in 1986 in Gorky to a Jewish family, emigrated with his parents to Israel at age five, and began taking courses at the Open University of Israel in eighth grade. When he was 16, the family moved to Canada; after a month in high school, he was admitted to the University of Toronto directly into the third year. He did his PhD under Geoffrey Hinton, and it was in his group, together with Alex Krizhevsky, that he built AlexNet in 2012, a neural network that won the ImageNet image recognition competition by such a margin that the entire industry switched to deep learning and Nvidia graphics cards, as I write in the profile of Jensen Huang. After a brief internship with Andrew Ng at Stanford, he joined Google Brain, where he co-created the sequence-to-sequence algorithm, the foundation of modern machine translation, worked on TensorFlow, and co-authored the paper on AlphaGo.

OpenAI: Scaling, ChatGPT and Five Days in November 2023

At the end of 2015, he left Google to become co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI; Sam Altman recruited him personally. Sutskever is credited with the company’s “scaling ethos,” the belief that larger models and more data would yield qualitatively new capabilities, which led to GPT-3 and ChatGPT. In 2022, he wrote that today’s large networks might be “slightly conscious,” which sparked controversy. In 2023, he co-led the Superalignment team, which was supposed to solve the problem of controlling superintelligence in four years. In November 2023, as a board member, he submitted a 52-page memo based largely on information from Mira Murati and voted to fire Altman; a week later he expressed regret, left the board, and disappeared from the office. In May 2024, he left OpenAI.

Safe Superintelligence: A Company Without a Product

In June 2024, together with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, he founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. The premise is the opposite of OpenAI: no products or revenue, “the first product will be safe superintelligence.” Investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia, gave them one billion dollars in September 2024 and two billion in March 2025, at a valuation of $32 billion. The company does not publish models, so its progress cannot be verified in the AI model ranking; all that is known are the names of researchers and valuations.

Frequently Asked Questions

How old is Ilya Sutskever?

39 or 40; only the year of birth, 1986, is publicly known.

Why did he fire Sam Altman?

According to accounts cited by Wikipedia and the press, he accused Altman of dishonesty toward the board, manipulating managers, and stoking divisions. After a rebellion by employees and investors, Altman returned after five days, and Sutskever said he regretted his role.

How does SSI differ from OpenAI?

OpenAI sells products (ChatGPT, API) and finances research from that. SSI declares it will not release anything commercial until it builds superintelligence it deems safe, and sustains itself solely on investor capital.

Sources checked September 18, 2026: Wikipedia EN “Ilya Sutskever” with citations (The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Reuters, NeurIPS), Safe Superintelligence Inc. press releases.

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