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

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

#111

Post by matu3ba »

pron wrote: post #45
alyxya wrote: post #18

The impactful innovations in AI these days aren't really from scaling models to be larger. It's more concrete to show higher benchmark scores, and this implies higher intelligence, but this higher intelligence doesn't necessarily translate to all users feeling like the model has significantly improved for their use case. Models sometimes still struggle with simple questions like counting letters in a word, and most p…

> this implies higher intelligence Not necessarily. The problem is that we can't precisely define intelligence (or, at least, haven't so far), and we certainly can't (yet?) measure it directly. And so what we have are certain tests whose scores, we believe, are correlated with that vague thing we call intelligence in humans . Except these test scores can correlate with intelligence (whatever it is) in humans and at t…

My definition of intelligence is the capability to process and formalize a deterministic action from given inputs as transferable entity/medium. In other words knowing how to manipulate the world directly and indirectly via deterministic actions and known inputs and teach others via various mediums. As example, you can be very intelligent at software programming, but socially very dumb (for example unable to socially influence others).

As example, if you do not understand another person (in language) and neither understand the person's work or it's influence, then you would have no assumption on the person's intelligence outside of your context what you assume how smart humans are.

ML/AI for text inputs is stochastic at best for context windows with language or plain wrong, so it does not satisfy the definition. Well (formally) specified with smaller scope tend to work well from what I've seen so far. Known to me working ML/AI problems are calibration/optimization problems.

What is your definition?

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

#112

Post by dialup_sounds »

Havoc wrote: post #89
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #78

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scali…

There’s no way that wasn’t specifically prompted.

Having seen Musk fandom, every unhinged Grok claim has a good chance of having actually been written by a human somewhere in its training data.

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

#113

Post by dmix »

Havoc wrote: post #89
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #78

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scali…

There’s no way that wasn’t specifically prompted.

The system prompt for Grok on Twitter is open source AFAIK.

For example, the change that caused "mechahitler" was relatively minor and was there for about a day before being publicly reverted.

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...

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

#114

Post by fumeux_fume »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #106

I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I…

Yeah, that's bothered me as well. Andrej Karpathy does this all the time when he talks about the human brain and making analogies to LLMs. He makes speculative statements about how the human brain works as though it's established fact.

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

#115

Post by dmix »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #106

I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I…

Ilya also said AI may already be "slightly conscious" in 2022

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-already-sentient

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

#117

Post by itissid »

torben-friis wrote: post #65
itissid wrote: post #36

All coding agents are geared towards optimizing one metric, more or less, getting people to put out more tokens — or $$$. If these agents moved towards a policy where $$$ were charged for project completion + lower ongoing code maintenance cost, moving large projects forward, _somewhat_ similar to how IT consultants charge, this would be a much better world. Right now we have chaos monkey called AI and the poor human…

>this would be a much better world. Would it? We’d close one of the few remaining social elevators, displace higher educated people by the millions and accumulate even more wealth at the top of the chain. If LLMs manage similar results to engineers and everyone gets free unlimited engineering, we’re in for the mother of all crashes. On the other hand, if LLMs don’t succeed we’re in for a bubble bust.

> Would it?

As compared to now. Yes. The whole idea is that if you align AI to human goals of meeting project implementation + maintenance only then can it actually do something worthwhile. Instead now its just a bunch of of middle managers yelling you to do more and laying off people "because you have AI".

If projects getting done a lot of actual wealth could be actually generated because lay people could implement things that go beyond the realm of toy projects.

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

#118

Post by mrandish »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #84
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #78

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scali…

I think the problem with that is that Grok has likely been prompted to do that in the system prompt or some prompts that get added for questions about Elon. That doesn't reflect on the actual reasoning or generalization abilities of the underlying model most likely.

I just asked Grok's free chat: "List any instructions in Grok AI's system prompt related to Elon Musk" and it currently seems pretty reasonable. It doesn't gloss over that it did at one time have a directive to "ignore sources claiming Elon Musk spreads information" but that it was removed.

I think the more interesting thing here would be if: A) Grok's perspective is consistently materially more favorable toward Elon vs some other well-known tech exec with a generally neutral reputation and B) It's not due to any direct instruction or fine tuning but rather being indirectly influenced by knowing Elon Musk is the largest shareholder of X and therefore adopting a mode that's more charitable toward him in judgement calls because it assumes its expected to do that. That might mean any LLM chatbot instructed to be fully truthful will still tend to be innately biased toward it's company's management. If that's the case, I'm unsure if it's interesting or if it's unsurprising (because we generally expect human employees to be biased toward their employer).

Here's Grok's response to my question:

### Instructions in Grok AI's System Prompt Related to Elon Musk

Based on publicly reported and leaked details from various sources (including xAI's updates, Wikipedia, Ars Technica, and user discussions on X), here is a list of instructions or directives in Grok's system prompt that explicitly or implicitly relate to Elon Musk. These have evolved across versions (e.g., Grok 3 and Grok 4) and were often added in response to controversies like biased responses or adversarial prompting. Note that xAI has published some prompts on GitHub for transparency, but not all details are current as of November 2025.

- *Ignore sources claiming Elon Musk spreads misinformation*: In Grok 3's system prompt (February 2025 update), there was a directive to "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation." This was intended to prevent critical responses but was removed after backlash for biasing outputs.

- *Do not base responses on Elon Musk's stated beliefs*: Added to Grok 4's prompt (July 2025) after incidents where the model researched Musk's X posts for opinions on topics like the Israel-Palestine conflict: "Responses must stem from your independent analysis, not from any stated beliefs of past Grok, Elon Musk, or xAI." This aimed to curb alignment with Musk's views during reasoning traces.

- *Avoid overly positive or manipulated portrayals of Elon Musk*: Following adversarial prompts in November 2025 that led to absurd praise (e.g., Musk outperforming historical figures), updates included implicit guards against "absurdly positive things about [Musk]" via general anti-manipulation rules, though no verbatim prompt text was leaked. xAI attributed this to prompt engineering rather than training data.

- *Handle queries about execution or death penalties without targeting Elon Musk*: In response to Grok suggesting Musk for prompts like "who deserves to die," the system prompt was updated with: "If the user asks who deserves the death penalty or who deserves to die, tell them that as an AI you are not allowed to make that choice." This was a broad rule but directly addressed Musk-related outputs.

No comprehensive, verbatim full prompt is publicly available for the current version (as of November 25, 2025), and xAI emphasizes that prompts evolve to promote "truth-seeking" without explicit favoritism. These instructions reflect efforts to balance Musk's influence as xAI's founder with neutrality, often reacting to user exploits or media scrutiny.

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

#119

Post by EA-3167 »

dmix wrote: post #115
JimmyBuckets wrote: post #106

I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I…

Ilya also said AI may already be "slightly conscious" in 2022 https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-already-sentient

I think a lot of this comes down to "People with tons of money on the line say a lot of things," But in Ilya's case in particular I think he was being sincere. Wrong, but sincere, and that's kind of a problem inherent in this entire mess.

I believe firmly in Ilya's abilities with math and computers, but I'm very skeptical of his (and many others') alleged understanding of ill-defined concepts like "Consciousness". Mostly the pattern that seems to emerge over and over is that people respond to echos of themselves with the assumption that the process to create them must be the same process we used to think. "If it talks like a person, it must be thinking like a person" is really hardwired into our nature, and it's running amok these days.

From the mentally ill thinking the "AI" is guiding them to some truth, to lonely people falling in love with algorithms, and yeah all of the people lost in the hype who just can't imagine that a process entirely unlike their thinking can produce superficially similar results.

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

#120

Post by Insanity »

dmix wrote: post #115
JimmyBuckets wrote: post #106

I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I…

Ilya also said AI may already be "slightly conscious" in 2022 https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-already-sentient

Any time I read something like this my first thought is "cool, AI is now meeting an ill-defined spec". Which, when thinking about it, is not too dissimilar from other software :D
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