Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
11/25/20251 hr 36 min
Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) – Explaining model jaggedness
(00:09:39) - Emotions and value functions
(00:18:49) – What are we scaling?
(00:25:13) – Why humans generalize better than models
(00:35:45) – SSI’s plan to straight-shot superintelligence
(00:46:47) – SSI’s model will learn from deployment
(00:55:07) – How to think about powerful AGIs
(01:18:13) – “We are squarely an age of research company”
(01:30:26) – Self-play and multi-agent
(01:32:42) – Research taste
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsIlya Sutskever· Guest0:00
You know what's crazy?
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:01
Uh-huh.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:01
That all of this is real.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:04
Yeah? Meaning what?
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:05
Don't, don't you think so?
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:06
Meaning what?
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:06
Like all this AI stuff, and all this Bay- Like, it actually happened? ... Area? Yeah, that it's happe- like, isn't it straight out of science fiction?
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:13
Yeah. I- i- another thing that's crazy is, like, how normal the slow takeoff feels. The idea that we'd be investing 1% of GDP in AI, like, I feel like it would ha- felt like a bigger deal, you know? Where right now, it just feels like- We get used to things pretty fast, turns out, yeah.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:29
But also, it's kinda like it's abstract. Like, what does it mean? What it means that you see it in the news- Yeah. ... that such and such company announced such and such dollar amount.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:38
Right.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:39
That's, that's all you see.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:41
Right.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:41
It's not really felt in any other way, so far.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:45
No. Should we actually begin here? I think this is an interesting discussion.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:47
Sure.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:48
I think your point about, well, from the average person's point of view, nothing is that different, will continue being true, even into the singularity.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:57
No, I don't think so.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:58
Okay. Interesting.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest0:59
So, the thing which I was referring to not feeling different is, okay, so such and such company announced some, uh, difficult-to-comprehend dollar amount of investment.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:12
Right.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest1:12
I don't think anyone knows what to do with that.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:15
Yeah.
Ilya Sutskever· Guest1:15
But I think that the impact of AI is gonna be felt. AI is going to be diffused through the economy. There are very strong economic forces for this. And I think the impact is going to be felt very strongly.