Who is Ilya Sutskever, man at center of OpenAI shakeup?

Last month, Sutskever, who generally shies away from the media spotlight, sat down with MIT Technology Review for a long interview. The Israeli-Canadian told the magazine that his new focus was on how to prevent an artificial superintelligence—which can outmatch humans but as far as we know doesn’t yet exist—from going rogue.

Sutskever was born in Soviet Russia but raised in Jerusalem from the age of five. He then studied at the University of Toronto with Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in artificial intelligence sometimes called the “godfather of AI.” 

Earlier this year, Hinton left Google and warned that AI companies were racing toward danger by aggressively creating generative-AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he told the New York Times.

Hinton and two of his graduate students—one of them being Sutskever—developed a neural network in 2021 that they trained to identify objects in photos. Called AlexNet, the project showed that neural networks were much better at pattern recognition than had been generally realized. 

Impressed, Google bought Hinton’s spin-off DNNresearch—and hired Sutskever. While at the tech giant, Sutskever helped show that the same kind of pattern recognition displayed by AlexNet for images could also work for words and sentences.

But Sutskever soon came to the attention of another power player in artificial intelligence: Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The mercurial billionaire had long warned of the potential dangers AI poses to humanity. Years ago he grew alarmed by Google…