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How did this AI scientist end up having a salary of $1.9 million?
A dive into the singular life of Ilya Sutskever
In 2015, Ilya Sutskever was a young computer scientist that was specializing in Deep Learning.
That year, Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator (the biggest startup accelerator in the world) emailed him:
Hey, let’s get dinner with some cool people.
Ilya ended up having dinner with Greg Brockman (co-founder of Stripe), Elon Musk, and other influential personalities. In the meeting, they explained they wanted to create a new AI lab. The timing was perfect for him, as he had been daydreaming about creating his own AI company.
They founded the lab that years later became a world leader in AI research.
Creating advanced and scary technologies like the famous GPT, a deep learning model that’s capable of creating disturbingly real conversations. Like in this example, where GPT (as Norn) is introducing the programmer to a mystical world:
In this article, we’re going to discover how this young scientist born in Russia ended up being one of the most influential AI researchers of all time and what are his predictions for the industry.
The Right Place
To understand Ilya’s story, we need to start with Geoffrey Hinton’s story.
Hinton is the great-great-grandson of the mathematician and educator Mary Everest Boole and her husband, the logician George Boole, whose work eventually became foundational in computer sciences (the Boolean data type honors his last name).
Hinton studied psychology and artificial intelligence in the UK and, after difficulty finding funding for his investigation, he moved to the United States.
In 1986, while working at Carnegie Mellon, he was part of a team that showed the successful training of neural…
