OpenAI’s chief scientist helped to create ChatGPT — while worrying about AI safety

This story is part of Nature’s 10, an annual list compiled by Nature’s editors exploring key developments in science and the individuals who contributed to them.

As a teenager, Ilya Sutskever knocked on Geoffrey Hinton’s door at the University of Toronto in Canada and asked for a job. “He said he was cooking fries to make money over the summer, and he would rather be working for me doing AI,” says Hinton, who is often recognized as the godfather of modern artificial intelligence (AI).

Hinton gave the ambitious student…