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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:00.120

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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:14.400

will will will then be trying to figure out how how that's how that works. I do think though that one of the

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 00:22.000

things that's 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,

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:35.800

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 spell out what that is exactly. And how how are the By default, you would expect the company that has the model company that has that model to be getting

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 00:53.640

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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:04.360

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

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:24.000

how things have gone so far with the AI's of the past. So one company produced an advance and the other company 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

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 01:45.280

think from the market

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 01:46.320

perspective, I think something similar will happen there as well. Even if someone It's 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,

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:07.120

maybe there's another thing we haven't discussed on the on the the spec of the super 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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:24.360

have many of them. And you have some and you have some company that's producing a lot 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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:42.080

happen is that the way competition like competition loves specialization. And you see it 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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 02:57.920

initiatives in in this kind of world. We might say, yeah like one AI company is really quite a 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

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:14.720

that But is this is this contradicted by what human like learning implies? Is that like it can learn? It can, but, but, you have accumulated learning, you have a big investment. You spent a lot of compute to become really, really, really good, really phenomenal at this thing.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 03:29.760

And someone else spent a huge amount of computer and a huge amount of experience to get really, really good at some other thing. Right. You apply a lot of human learning to get there, but now like you you are you

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 03:38.160

are at this high point where someone else would say look like I don't wanna start learning what you've learned to go I with guess this that would require many different companies to begin at the human like continue a learning agent at the same time, so that they can start their

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 03:53.440

different research in different branches, but if one company you know, gets that agent first or gets that learner first, it does then seem like well, you know, they like we if you just think about every single job in the economy,

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:11.600

you just have uh instance learning each one seems tractable for a company. Yeah, that's

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:17.120

that that's that's a valid argument. My my strong intuition is that it's not how it's going to go. My strong intuition is that yeah like the argument says it will go this way. Yeah. But my strong intuition is that it will not go this way. That this is the You know, in in theory,

Ilya Sutskever (Co-founder and Chief Scientist) 04:33.940

there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is and I think that's going to be one of those.

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:38.300

A lot of people's models of recursive self-improvement literally explicitly state we will have a million Ilya's in a server that are coming in with different ideas and this will lead to a super intelligence emerging very fast. Do you have some intuition about how parallelizable

Dwarkesh Patel (Host) 04:53.100

the thing you are doing is? How how much how what are the gains from making copies of Ilya? I don't