Ilya Sutskever is recognized as a leader and genius who has delivered breakthrough Artificial Intelligence.
Ilya was the Chief Scientist at OpenAI and enabled OpenAI to become the leader in Artificial Intelligence. Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. He is notably the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network. From November to December 2012, Sutskever spent about two months as a postdoc with Andrew Ng at Stanford University. He then returned to the 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, and worked on TensorFlow. He is also one of the many co-authors of the AlphaGo paper.
At the end of 2015, he left Google to become cofounder and chief scientist of the newly founded organization OpenAI. He was personally recruited by Elon Musk into OpenAI. Tesla Inc. CEO and xAI founder Elon Musk held former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in such high regard that he broke his friendship with Alphabet co-founder Larry Page over it.
Sutskever is considered to have played a key role in the development of ChatGPT.
He has now been funded with a new company that will create Safe Superintelligence.
He claims he does not need to partner with a multi-trillion dollar company. He will clearly get tens of billions to buy the Nvidia hardware to develop Artificial Superintelligence. There is big money that is willing to make that bet on Ilya.
The safety of the ASI will be engineered on top of a system that will have core values like liberty and freedom.
Ilya likely is well positioned and well informed to determine that Superintelligence is achievable and he likely has a clear plan for doing it. The questions are when will he do it? Will it be ahead of OpenAI, Meta, Google, Amazon and Tesla/XAI, Anthropic, Chinese AI companies ?
Most of the major AI teams seem to have gotten to OpenAI GPT4-level AI systems within about one year of the leader.
If all of the teams get there within a year of each other then what will that mean?
If all major AI teams make huge AI advances then it will be a world with robotaxi, advanced humanoid robots and superintelligence and increasing amounts of AI.
If the superintelligence comes from the same large language model based approach then it does seem like any one team can form a large lead and create a sustainable gap in capability.
If Ilya is still building upon the neural network foundation that he has been advancing then it means all teams will get to superintelligence. His insight seems to be related to a foundation that includes safety values engineered at the start.
The other gap AI companies can create is in areas where their business models creates sustainable data and manufacturing advantages. If it is "just" the AI brains and systems that seems to be copied quickly.