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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:00.440

intelligent desires. But your point is that the desire is maybe this is not your point, but one way to understand it is the desire is built into the genome and the genome is not intelligent, right? But it's able to you're somehow able to describe this feature that requires like

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:15.320

it's not even clear how you define that feature and you can get it into you can build it into the genes. Yeah, essentially. Or maybe I'll put it differently. If you think about the tools that are available to the genome, it says, "Okay, here's a recipe for building a brain." And

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:30.880

you could say, "Here is a recipe for connecting the dopamine neurons to like the smell sensor." Yeah. And if the smell is a certain kind of, you know, good smell, you want to eat that. I could imagine the genome doing that. I'm I'm claiming that it is harder to imagine. It's

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:46.120

harder to imagine the genome saying, "You should care about some complicated computation that your

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:53.120

entire brain that like a big chunk of your brain does. That's all I'm claiming. I I can tell you like a speculation I was wondering how it could be done and let me offer a speculation and I'll explain why the speculation is probably false. So the speculation is okay. So the

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:08.920

brain

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:10.120

it's like the brain has those regions you know the brain regions we have our cortex right it has all those brain regions and the cortex is uniform but the brain regions And and and the neurons in the cortex, they kind of speak to their neighbors mostly. And that explains why you

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:26.920

get brain regions. Because if you want to do some kind of speech processing, all the neurons that do speech need to talk to each other. And they can and because neurons can only speak to their nearby neighbors, for the most part, it has to be a region. All the regions are mostly

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:39.600

located in the same place from person to person. So maybe evolution hardcoded literally a location on the brain. So it says, "Oh, like when when like, you know, the GP

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:52.040

GPS of the brain, GPS coordinates, such and such. When that fires, that's what you should care about. Like maybe that's what evolution did, because that would be within the toolkit of evolution. Yeah, although there are examples where, for example, people who are born blind have

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 02:05.040

that area of their cortex adopted by another sense. And I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:15.680

the desires or the reward functions which require visual signal no longer worked, you know, people who have their different areas of their cortex co-opted. For example, if you no longer have vision, can you still feel the sense that I want people around me to like me and so

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:33.840

forth, which usually there's also visual cues for. So, I actually fully agree with that. I I think there's an even stronger counterargument to this theory which is like if you think about people, so there are people who get half of their brains removed in uh childhood. Yeah. And

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:50.440

they still have all their brain regions but they all somehow move to just one hemisphere, which suggests that the brain regions the their location is not fixed and so that theory is not true. It would have been cool if it was true, but it's not. And so I think that's a mystery,

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:04.680

but it's an interesting mystery. Like the fact is somehow evolution was able to endow us to care about social stuff very, very reliably. And even people who have like all kinds of strange mental conditions and deficiencies and emotional problems tend to care about this also. The

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:21.280

AI tools like like defakes, voice clones, and agents have dramatically increased the sophistication of fraud and abuse. So, it's more important than ever to actually understand the identity and intent of whoever or whatever is using your platform.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 03:38.120

That's exactly what Sardine helps you do. Sardine brings together thousands of device, behavior, and identity signals to help you assess risk. Everything from how a user types or moves their mouse

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:50.080

or holds their device to whether their hiding their true location behind a VPN

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 03:55.200

to whether they're injecting a fake camera feed during KYC selfie checks. Sardine combines these signals with insights from their network of almost 4 billion devices. Things like a user's history of fraud or their associations with other higher accounts. So you can spot bad

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:11.840

actors before

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:13.200

they do damage. This would literally be impossible if you only use data from your own application. Sardine doesn't stop a detection. They offer a suite of agents to streamline onboarding tracks and automate investigations. So, as fraudsters use AI to scale their attacks, you can

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:29.640

use AI to scale your defenses. Go to sardine.ai/thwart cash to learn more and download their guide on AI fraud detection. What is SSI planning on doing differently? So presumably your plan is to be one of the

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:45.020

frontier companies when this time arrives. And then what is presumably you started SSI because you're like I I think I have a way of approaching how to do this safely in a

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:57.060

way that the other companies don't. What what is that difference? So the way I would describe it as There are some ideas that I think are promising and I want to investigate them and see if they are