(Photo: Matthew Volpe)

More than two dozen startups and entrepreneurs from the University of Toronto community are recognized in first .

The online tech publication’s special issue aims to spotlight the “big swings” taken in tech and innovation in Canada.

Of the 85 tech players mentioned in the issue, nearly one third have a connection to U of T.

Among the people and companies recognized with ties to the ������Ƶ of Computer Science are:

• , the autonomous trucking company founded by Professor

• , the enterprise AI company launched by alumni Nick Frosst and Aidan Gomez; and former computer science student Ivan Zhang

• Assistant Professor , founding member of

• Alumnus and Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of , and more recently,

“This list demonstrates just how integral U of T-affiliated companies are to Canada’s innovation landscape in crucial fields ranging from sustainability and space tech to health care and transportation,” says Leah Cowen, vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives.

“The university has long been committed to generating big ideas and game-changing research — and then providing the support necessary for ambitious entrepreneurs to move those discoveries out of the lab and into the world where they can have the most impact.”

With files from

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 — and conversations around the technology’s responsible use — 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’s 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 — “I was utterly enchanted,” — 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. “I remember thinking a lot about the nature of existence and consciousness … about souls and intelligence. I felt very strongly that learning was this mysterious thing: humans clearly learn, computers clearly don’t.”

Admitted into U of T’s 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’s degree and PhD in computer science at U of T — the latter under the supervision of Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, .

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

Among Sutskever’s 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 — a crude forerunner to ChatGPT. “I give it an initial segment of text. And I say, from this text, keep on producing text that you think looks like Wikipedia,” .

Then, in 2012, Sutskever, Hinton and another of Hinton’s 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 — effectively changing the AI game overnight. (The source code for AlexNet is to be in Silicon Valley.)

(Photo: Lisa Sakulensky)

Sutskever then joined Hinton’s 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: — 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.

“We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead,” Sutskever and co-founders .

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

— Original story by Rahul Kalvapalle for