Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:00.000

What as speaking of forecast, what are your forecast to this system you're describing which can learn as well as a human and subsequently as a result becomes superhuman?

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:11.680

I think like 5 to 20.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:14.520

5 to 20 years? So I just want to unroll your how you might see the world coming. It's like we have a couple more years where these other companies are continuing the current approach and it's stalls out. And stalls out here meaning they earn no more than low hundreds of billions

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:31.840

in revenue or how do you think about what stalling out means?

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:34.760

Yeah. I think the I think it could I think it could stall out and I think stalling out will look like it will all look very similar.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:46.240

Yeah.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:46.720

Among all the different companies, something like this. I'm not sure because I think I think I think even with I think even I think even with stalling out I think these companies could make us stupendous stupendous revenue. Maybe not profits because they will be it will be they

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:01.000

will need to work hard to differentiate each other from themselves. But revenue definitely.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:06.120

But there's something your model implies that the when when the correct solution does emerge, there will be convergence between all the companies. And I'm curious why you think that's the case.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:17.860

Well, I was talking more about convergence on their largest strategies. I think eventual convergence on the technical approach is probably going to happen as well. But I in I was alluding to convergence to the largest strategies. What what what exactly is the thing that should

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:30.260

be done?

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:31.580

I I just want to be a bit better understand how you see the future enrollment. So, currently we have these different companies and you expect their approach to continue generate earning revenue, but not get to this human-like learner.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:40.740

Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:42.020

So now we have these different forks of companies. We have view, we have thinking machines, there's a bunch of other labs.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:47.340

Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:47.900

And maybe one of them figures out the correct approach.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:50.180

Mhm.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:51.060

But then the release of the product makes it clear to other people how to do this thing.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:55.500

I think it won't be clear how to do it thing, but it will be clear that something different is possible. Right. And that is information. And I think people will will will then be trying to figure out how how that's how that works. I do think though that one of the things that's

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:12.380

that I think, you know, not addressed here not discussed is that with each increase in the AI's capabilities, I think there will be some kind of changes, but I don't know exactly which ones in how things are being done. And so like I think it's going to be important, yet I can't

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:33.100

spell out what that is exactly.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 02:35.180

And how how are the By default, you would expect the company that has the model company that has that model to be getting all these games because they have the model that is learning how to do all has the skills and knowledge that it's building up in the world. What is the

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 02:50.620

reason to think that the benefits of that would be widely distributed

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 02:53.260

and not just end up at whatever model company gets this continuous learning loop going first?

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:59.020

Like I think that empirically what happens so here here is what I think is going to happen. Number one, I think empirically when Let's let's look at let's look at how things have gone so far with the AI's of the past. So one company produced an advance and the other company

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:20.420

scrambled and produced some some some similar things after some amount of time and they started to compete in the market and push their push the prices down. And so I think from the market perspective, I think something similar will happen there as well. Even if someone It's

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:39.460

okay, we're talking about the good world by the way. Where What's the good world? What's the good world? Where we have these powerful human like learners that are also like And by the way, maybe there's another thing we haven't discussed on the on the the spec of the super

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:01.060

intelligent AI that I think is worth considering is that you make it narrow. can be useful and narrow at the same time. So, you can have lots of narrow super intelligent AI's. But suppose you have many of them. And you have some and you have some company that's producing a lot

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:19.300

of um profits from it. And then you have another company that comes in and starts to compete. And the way the competition is going to work is through specialization. I think what's going to happen is that the way competition like competition loves specialization. And you see it

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:40.100

in the market, you see it in evolution as well. So you're going to have lots of different initiatives and you're going to have lots of different companies who are occupying different initiatives in in this kind of world. We might say, yeah like one AI company is really quite a

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:54.540

bit better at some area of really complicated economic activity and a different company is better at another area. And the third company is really good at litigation and that's the one that