Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI; co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence Inc.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
Sutskever was the scientific mind behind OpenAI's biggest breakthroughs, took part in the 2023 board revolt over safety, and then left to found a company whose single goal is a 'safe superintelligence'. He has not given a probability of doom, but expects machines that can do everything humans do within roughly five to twenty years and says the transition must be gradual and aimed at AI that cares about sentient life.
Declines to give a number
On timing
Asked when a system that learns as well as humans and then becomes superhuman will arrive: "I think like 5 to 20" [years] (Dwarkesh Podcast, November 25, 2025). Also: "AI will do all the things that we can do—not just some of them, but all of them" (University of Toronto convocation, June 6, 2025).
SourceWhat they call for
- Safety first development of superintelligence ('straight shot')
- Gradual release of powerful systems
- AI 'robustly aligned to care about sentient life'
- Return to an 'age of research' rather than pure scaling
In their own words
"AI will do all the things that we can do—not just some of them, but all of them." / "The real challenge with AI is that it is really unprecedented and really extreme."
6 June 2025
"It's back to the age of research again, just with big computers." / Goal: "An AI that's robustly aligned to care about sentient life specifically." / "You would still do a gradual release of it, that's how I would imagine it."
25 November 2025
Signed the CAIS statement: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."
30 May 2023
Signed
- CAIS extinction statement 2023