Ilya Sutskever is a computer scientist who has been at the center of several landmark deep learning results. He was the second author of the 2012 NeurIPS paper “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks” (AlexNet), written with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, which showed that deep convolutional networks could dramatically outperform prior methods on large-scale image recognition.
In 2014 Sutskever was first author of “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks,” with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc V. Le, which introduced an encoder-decoder approach using LSTMs and became a cornerstone of neural machine translation and later language modeling.
Sutskever was a co-founder of OpenAI and served as its chief scientist, and in 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence Inc., a research lab focused on building safe superintelligence. His work spans the empirical breakthroughs that defined the deep learning era.