Where Sam Altman is known for his risk-taking approach to artificial intelligence development that sometimes even comes at the cost of safety, Ilya Sutskever plays it safer. Sutskever harbours deep concerns about the dangers of AI and reportedly played a key role in persuading fellow board members at OpenAI that Altman’s fast-paced approach to AI deployment was not the way. This sparked the series of events that led to one of the most dramatic CEO reshuffles in tech in years. Altman ultimately emerged as the winner, though, and was reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI mere days after his firing, with Sutskever doing a 180 saying that he deeply regrets his participation in the board’s actions. While no longer a part of the board of the company he actually co-founded, Sutskever’s fears are not unsubstantiated. The rapid development and deployment of powerful AI models like ChatGPT have been flagged by researchers and regulators alike who’ve questioned the safety of such technologies. In fact, Sutskever himself admitted in an MIT Technology Review that he didn’t think ChatGPT was good enough before its record-breaking launch. Ilya Sutskever is regarded as a visionary in the field of AI. Born in Soviet Russia in 1986 but raised in Jerusalem from the age of 5, he studied at the Open University of Israel before moving to the University of Toronto. From there, Sutskever received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 2005, an MSc in computer science in 2007, and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 2013. His work initially at the University of Toronto was highly experimental – the university magazine described early software developed by him as one that created nonsensical Wikipedia-like entries. But then he got his initial break in 2012 co-authoring a paper with Alex Krizhevsky and his doctoral supervisor Geoffrey Hinton (often credited as the ‘godfather of AI’) that demonstrated the remarkable abilities of the deep learning algorithms he had been exploring. The project, dubbed AlexNet, had the power to solve pattern recognition problems at an unprecedented level.

Full story : Who is Ilya Sutskever, the AI scientist ousted from OpenAI board and why he is cynical about AGI,