Ilya Sutskever
The Scaling Believer
AlexNet, seq2seq, and the GPT line
Rating
96Impact score
Domains
Deep learningLanguage modelsAlignment
Scouting report
Co-author of AlexNet, then of sequence-to-sequence learning, then co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI through the GPT series. The through-line of his career is a conviction that scale plus the right objective gets you most of the way, held earlier and harder than almost anyone. Left in 2024 to found Safe Superintelligence.
Curator’s note
Bet on scale before it was obvious, three separate times.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Ilya Sutskever by Eladkarmel, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources
- 01Ilya Sutskever en.wikipedia.org
- 02Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks (2014) arxiv.org