OpenAI's Chief Scientist Made a Tragic Miscalculation

Ilya Sutskever, bless his heart. Until recently, to the extent that Sutskever was known at all, it was as a brilliant artificial-intelligence researcher. He was the star student who helped Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers of AI," kick off the so-called deep-learning revolution. In 2015, after a short stint at Google, Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and eventually became its chief scientist; so important was he to the company's success that Elon Musk has taken credit for recruiting him. Still, apart from niche podcast appearances and the obligatory hour-plus back-and-forth with Lex Fridman, Sutskever didn't have much of a public profile before this past weekend.