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Ilya Sutskever, a leader in AI and its responsible development, receives U of T honorary degree

From co-authoring seminal research papers to co-founding the research organization that developed ChatGPT, few people have been as influential in shaping the artificial intelligence landscape 鈥 and conversations around the technology鈥檚 responsible use 鈥 as Ilya Sutskever.

As a University of Toronto graduate student, Sutskever co-authored one of the most cited academic papers of this century and has since played a central role in driving the development and adoption of a technology that is transforming the economy, society and people鈥檚 everyday lives.

Today, for his foundational work and global impact as a computer scientist and artificial intelligence (AI) visionary, and for his outstanding service as an advocate of safe and responsible AI, Sutskever will receive a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from U of T.

Born in Russia and raised in Israel, Sutskever became fascinated with computing at age five, when he first laid eyes on a computer 鈥 鈥淚 was utterly enchanted,鈥 鈥 and his interest continued into his teen years, when he emigrated to Canada with his family.

Even as a teenager, Sutskever envisioned building computers with human-like capabilities. 鈥淚 remember thinking a lot about the nature of existence and consciousness 鈥 about souls and intelligence. I felt very strongly that learning was this mysterious thing: humans clearly learn, computers clearly don鈥檛.鈥

Admitted into U of T鈥檚 math program out of Grade 11, Sutskever immediately immersed himself in upper-year courses. Graduating with an honours bachelor of science degree in mathematics in 2005, he went on to earn a master鈥檚 degree and PhD in computer science at U of T 鈥 the latter under the supervision of Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, .

Hinton recalls being hugely impressed with Sutskever in their early interactions. , the 鈥済odfather of AI鈥 recounted giving Sutskever 鈥 who had knocked on his door and expressed an interest in joining his lab 鈥 a paper to read and being taken aback by the clarity of his responses. 鈥淗is immediate reaction to things were reactions that had taken experts in the field quite a long time to come up with,鈥 Hinton said.

Among Sutskever鈥檚 research projects at U of T was a program that used neural networks, which are computational models inspired by the human brain, to learn about language and generate text 鈥 a crude forerunner to ChatGPT. 鈥淚 give it an initial segment of text. And I say, from this text, keep on producing text that you think looks like Wikipedia,鈥 .

Then, in 2012, Sutskever, Hinton and another of Hinton鈥檚 graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky, developed AlexNet, a convolutional neural network that was trained to identify objects in a purpose-built image database with far more accuracy than competing approaches 鈥 effectively changing the AI game overnight. (The source code for AlexNet is to be in Silicon Valley.)

Two sets of two men stand facing each other on a stage wearing academic regalia

(Photo: Lisa Sakulensky)

Sutskever then joined Hinton鈥檚 spinoff company DNNResearch, which was later acquired by Google. Brought on as a research scientist at Google Brain, he contributed to yet another AI milestone: 鈥 and then beating a professional (human) player. He also co-developed sequence-to-sequence models, which are foundational to current machine translation systems.

In 2015, Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, serving as its research director and later as chief scientist. Under his leadership, OpenAI introduced the large language models that power ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot now used by millions around the world for everything from drafting emails and sourcing recipes to writing computer code. And he played a central role in the creation of large reasoning models, which perform complex reasoning tasks.

Sutskever left the organization last year and co-founded Safe SuperIntelligence, a company that is developing safe AI systems with superhuman capabilities.

鈥淲e plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead,鈥 Sutskever and co-founders .

Sutskever鈥檚 achievements have led to him being elected to the prestigious Royal Society in the UK and being named among TIME鈥檚 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and 2024, among other honours.

Original story by Rahul Kalvapalle for

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