Person
Ilya Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever is one of the most influential researchers in modern AI, a co-inventor of several foundational techniques and, for years, OpenAI's chief scientist. He was among the board members who voted to remove Sam Altman in November 2023, an episode later detailed in his 2025 court deposition, and he left OpenAI the following year to co-found Safe Superintelligence, a lab pursuing a single research goal with no intermediate products. Investors have valued the company in the tens of billions of dollars on the strength of his reputation alone, despite it shipping nothing publicly; in 2026 it agreed a large compute partnership with Nvidia. He has continued to argue that the field's reliance on ever-larger pre-training is reaching its limits.
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- Labs & people 8
- Ideas & essays 8
- Money & business 5
- Safety & alignment 5
- Courts & copyright 3
- Compute & infrastructure 1
- Benchmarks & progress 1
- Government & policy 1
- Models & capabilities 1
SSI and Nvidia announce long-term strategic partnership
Nvidia invests roughly $5bn in Safe Superintelligence and grants access to its next-generation Vera Rubin platform, SSI's first major public update since 2024.
Money & business · Compute & infrastructure
Musk v Altman/OpenAI trial begins
Musk sought as much as $134bn in damages to be paid to OpenAI's charity, plus Altman's removal from the board, in a case tried before a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland.
Courts & copyright · Money & business · Labs & people
Unsealed filing details OpenAI's account of the Musk restructuring dispute
The filing said Musk had sought majority equity control and roughly $80bn for a self-sustaining Mars city; Altman posted the claim publicly on X the same day.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
Dwarkesh Patel's second interview with Ilya Sutskever declares the scaling era over
Sutskever said models 'generalize dramatically worse than people,' citing an example of an AI that fixes a bug, breaks it again, then reverts to the original error when corrected.
Ideas & essays
Ilya Sutskever's deposition reveals details of the 2023 OpenAI board conflict
Sutskever testified that most of the allegations behind his 52-page memo against Altman came secondhand from Mira Murati and were never independently verified.
Labs & people
Over 40 researchers across OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind publish joint chain-of-thought monitorability paper
The paper argued that a safety technique available today, reading a model's reasoning traces, could vanish under training pressure and urged labs to track and preserve it.
Ideas & essays · Safety & alignment
Safe Superintelligence raises $2bn at $32bn valuation with no product
Greenoaks Capital led the round, with Alphabet and Nvidia investing alongside it, months after SSI had raised $1bn at a $5bn valuation with no product to show.
Money & business · Labs & people
Reports emerge that pre-training gains are slowing
Reuters cited a dozen AI scientists and investors, and quoted Ilya Sutskever saying results from scaling up pre-training had plateaued, pointing instead to inference-time reasoning techniques.
Ideas & essays · Benchmarks & progress
Safe Superintelligence raises $1B
The round reportedly valued the two-and-a-half-month-old company at around $5 billion, paid entirely in cash despite SSI having shipped no public product.
Money & business
Sutskever founds Safe Superintelligence
Sutskever co-founded the lab with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, split between Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, one month after leaving OpenAI's board and chief-scientist role.
Labs & people · Safety & alignment
Jan Leike resigns and the superalignment team dissolves
Leike said his team had been 'sailing against the wind' for compute and access; OpenAI reassigned remaining members rather than replacing the team's leadership.
Labs & people · Safety & alignment · Ideas & essays
OpenAI responds to Elon Musk's lawsuit over its founding mission
OpenAI said Musk had contributed $45 million rather than the $1 billion he pledged, and published emails in which he proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla or taking full control.
Courts & copyright · Labs & people
OpenAI publishes 'Weak-to-Strong Generalization' superalignment paper
Fine-tuning GPT-4 on labels from a GPT-2-sized supervisor recovered close to GPT-3.5-level performance on language tasks, but the technique still struggled on chess puzzles and reward modelling.
Ideas & essays · Safety & alignment
OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman, and reinstates him five days later
The board cited a loss of confidence but gave no detail; around 700 of roughly 770 employees threatened to resign, and the board itself was replaced.
Labs & people · Money & business
OpenAI commits 20% of its compute to superalignment
The pledge to devote a fifth of secured compute over four years was later disputed by the team's own co-lead, who said requests for GPUs were repeatedly refused.
Safety & alignment
'Let's Verify Step by Step' introduces process supervision for reasoning
Rewarding each correct step of a solution, not just the final answer, produced a model that solved 78% of a representative subset of the MATH benchmark.
Ideas & essays
OpenAI publishes 'Governance of superintelligence'
Altman, Brockman and Sutskever predicted AI would exceed expert skill 'in most domains' within a decade and called an outright pause unenforceable.
Ideas & essays · Government & policy
OpenAI publishes the GPT-3 paper
A 175-billion-parameter language model that learned new tasks from examples in its prompt, without any weight updates.
Models & capabilities · Ideas & essays
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