NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science

About the Award

Awarded for original scientific work of intrinsic scientific importance and with significant, beneficial applications in industry. The recipient is awarded a $25,000 prize.

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence, Inc. (SSI), will receive the 2026 NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science, presented for the first time in artificial intelligence.

Sutskever’s pioneering contributions have profoundly transformed artificial intelligence research and its industrial applications worldwide.

One of the most highly cited computer scientists in history, Sutskever is widely recognized for helping launch the deep learning revolution. His work has redefined the boundaries of machine intelligence through research breakthroughs that include AlexNet, Sequence-to-Sequence learning, and the GPT models, and through his contributions to CLIP, DALL-E and AlphaGo.

Sutskever co-founded OpenAI in 2015, and under his leadership as Chief Scientist, the company achieved the research breakthroughs that led to large language models and to the launch of ChatGPT. He also spearheaded the research that led to reasoning models such as OpenAI o1. Sutskever later led OpenAI’s Superintelligence safety team, known as Superalignment, until his departure in 2024. That same year, he co-founded his current company, Safe Superintelligence Inc., an AI research lab with the singular mission of developing safe superintelligence.

Award History

The NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science was established by the IBM Corporation in honor of its executive and applied mathematician Ralph E. Gomory. The award was first presented in 1990 to Carl Djerassi, who invented the first successful oral contraceptive and led the team that brought it to market and won its public acceptance.

Previous recipients of the NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science continue to achieve outstanding advancements in their fields. Five recipients have been honored with a National Medal of Science (Djerassi, 1973; Holonyak, 1990; Sinfelt, 1979; Hirschmann, 2000; Venter, 2008) and one recipient has received a Nobel Prize in Physics (Nakamura 2014).