Ilya Sutskever is a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist working in machine learning, who co-founded and serves as Chief Scientist of OpenAI.
He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. Sutskever is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.
After graduation in 2012, Sutskever spent two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to University of Toronto and joined Hinton’s new research company DNNResearch, a spinoff of Hinton’s research group. Four months later, in March 2013, Google acquired DNNResearch and hired Sutskever as a research scientist at Google Brain.
At Google Brain, Sutskever worked with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Viet Le to create the sequence-to-sequence learning algorithm. He is also a co-inventor of AlexNet and has worked on TensorFlow.
At the end of 2015, he left Google to become the director of newly founded OpenAI.