Earlier quoted context omitted.
A short history: 1986: Geoffrey Hinton publishes the backpropagation algorithm as applied to neural networks, allowing more efficient training. 2011: Jeff Dean starts Google Brain. 2012: Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton publish AlexNet, which demonstrates that using GPUs yields quicker training on deep networks, surpassing non-neural-network participants by a wide margin on an image categorization competition. 2013…
I know this is just a short history but I think it is inaccurate to say "2015: Ilya Sutskever founds OpenAI." I get that we all want to know what he saw etc and he's clearly one of the smartest people in the world but he didn't found OpenAI by himself. Nor was it his idea to?
But out of the co-founders, especially if we believe Elon's and Hinton's description of him, he may have been the one that mattered most for their scientific achievements.