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

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:00.100

indeed promising or not. It's really that simple. It's an attempt. I think that if the ideas turn out to be correct, these ideas that we discussed around understanding generalization. Hm. If these ideas turn out to be correct, then I think we will have something worth it. Will

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:20.540

it turn out to be correct? We are doing research. We are squarely

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:24.540

age of research company. We're making progress. We've actually made quite good progress over the past year, but we need to keep making more progress. Yeah. More research. And that's how I see it. I see it as an attempt to be an attempt to be a voice and a participant. Um, people

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:44.700

have asked uh your co-founder and previous CEO left to go to Meta recently. And people have asked, "Well, if If there was a lot of breakthroughs being made, that seems like I think that should have been unlikely. I wonder how you respond. Yeah, so I in for for this, I will

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:02.820

simply remind a few

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:04.220

facts that may have been forgotten. And I think this these facts which provide the context, I think they explain the situation. So the context was that we were fundraising at a 32 billion valuation and then Meta um came in and offered to to acquire us. And I said no,

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:27.660

but my former co-founder, like in some sense, said yes. And as a result, he also was able to enjoy from a lot of near term liquidity. And he was the only person from SSI to join Meta. It sounds like SSI's plan is to be a company that is at the frontier when you get to this very

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:48.420

important period in human history where you have superhuman intelligence and you have these ideas about how to make superhuman intelligence go well. But other companies will be trying their own ideas. What distinguishes SSI's approach to making super intelligence go well? The

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:05.540

main thing that distinguishes SSI is its technical approach. So we have a different technical approach that I think is worthy. And we are pursuing it. I maintain that in the end there will be a convergence of strategies. So I think there will be a convergence of of strategies

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:25.220

where at some point as AI becomes more powerful, it's going to become more or less clearer to everyone what the strategy should be. And it should be something like, yeah, you need to find some way to talk to each other and you want your first actual like real super intelligent

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:45.820

AI to be aligned and somehow be, you know, care for sentient life careful people, democratic, one of those, some combination of their own. And I think this is the condition that everyone should strive for. And that's what the SSI is striving for. And I think that this time, if

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:13.100

not already, all the other companies will realize that they're striving towards the same thing. And we'll see, I think that the world will truly change as I become more powerful. And I think a lot of these forecasts will like I think things will be really different and people

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:27.300

will be acting really differently. What as speaking of forecast, what are your forecast to

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 03:32.300

this system you're describing which can learn as well as a human

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:36.340

and subsequently as a result becomes superhuman? I think like 5 to 20. 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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:56.980

stalls out here meaning they earn no more than low hundreds of billions in revenue or how do you think about what stalling out means?

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:03.860

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. Yeah. 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

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:22.580

with stalling out I think these companies could make us stupendous stupendous revenue. Maybe not profits because they will be it will be they will need to work hard to differentiate each other from themselves. But revenue definitely.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:35.220

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. Well, I was talking more about convergence on their largest strategies. I think

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:50.560

eventual convergence on the technical approach is probably going to happen as well. But I in I was alluding to convergence

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:56.440

to the largest strategies. What what what exactly is the thing that should be done? 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,

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 05:08.120

but not get to this human-like learner. Yes. So now we have these different forks of companies. We have view, we have thinking machines, there's a bunch of other labs. Yes. And maybe one of them figures