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

dwarkesh.com

201–210 of 374 posts

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

#201

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing My guess is we'll discover that biological intelligence is 'learning' not just from your experience, but that of thousands of ancestors. There are a few weak pointers in that direction. Eg. A father who experiences a specific fear can pass that fear to grandchildren through sperm alone. [1]. I believe this is at least…

From both an architectural and learning algorithm perspective, there is zero reason to expect an LLM to perform remotely like a brain, nor for it to generalize beyond what was necessary for it to minimize training errors. There is nothing in the loss function of an LLM to incentivize it to generalize. However, for humans/animals the evolutionary/survival benefit of intelligence, learning from experience, is to correc…

> what evolution has given us is a learning architecture and learning algorithms that generalize well from extremely few samples.

This sounds magical though. My bet is that either the samples aren’t as few as they appear because humans actually operate in a constrained world where they see the same patterns repeat very many times if you use the correct similarity measures. Or, the learning that the brain does during human lifetime is really just a fine-tuning on top of accumulated evolutionary learning encoded in the structure of the brain.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presumes that performance improvements are necessary for commercialization. From what I've seen the models are smart enough, what we're lacking is the understanding and frameworks necessary to use them well. We've barely scratched the surface on commercialization. I'd argue there are two things coming: -> Era of Research -> Era of Engineering Previous AI winters happened because we didn't have a commercially via…

We still don't have a commercially viable product though?

If all frontier LLM labs agreed to a truce and stopped training to save on cost, LLMs would be immensely profitable now.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don't have a commercially viable product though?

google what you just said and look at the top hit it's a AI summary google eats that ad revenue it eats the whole thing it blocked your click on the link... it drinks your milkshake so, yes, there a 100 billion commercially viable product

And so ends the social contract of the web, the virtuous cycle of search engines sending traffic to smaller sites which collect ad revenue which in turn boosts search engine usage.

To thunderous applause.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presumes that performance improvements are necessary for commercialization. From what I've seen the models are smart enough, what we're lacking is the understanding and frameworks necessary to use them well. We've barely scratched the surface on commercialization. I'd argue there are two things coming: -> Era of Research -> Era of Engineering Previous AI winters happened because we didn't have a commercially via…

We still don't have a commercially viable product though?

I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.

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

#205
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this implies higher intelligence Models aren't intelligent, the intelligence is latent in the text (etc) that the model ingests. There is no concrete definition of intelligence, only that humans have it (in varying degrees). The best you can really state is that a model extracts/reveals/harnesses more intelligence from its training data.

There is no concrete definition of a chair either.

And yet I'm sitting in one

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don't have a commercially viable product though?

google what you just said and look at the top hit it's a AI summary google eats that ad revenue it eats the whole thing it blocked your click on the link... it drinks your milkshake so, yes, there a 100 billion commercially viable product

Google Search has 3 sources of revenue that I am aware of: ad revenue from the search results page, sponsored search results, and AdSense revenue on the websites the user is directed to.

If users just look at the AI overview at the top of the search page, Google is hobbling two sources of revenue (AdSense, sponsored search results), and also disincentivizing people from sharing information on the web that makes their AI overview useful. In the process of all this they are significantly increasing the compute costs for each Google search.

This may be a necessary step to stay competitive with AI startups' search products, but I don't think this is a great selling point for AI commercialization.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don't have a commercially viable product though?

If all frontier LLM labs agreed to a truce and stopped training to save on cost, LLMs would be immensely profitable now.

That isn't what I've seen: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all frontier LLM labs agreed to a truce and stopped training to save on cost, LLMs would be immensely profitable now.

That isn't what I've seen: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/#:~:text=Su...

Also independent analysis: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aurareturn&next=4596...

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presumes that performance improvements are necessary for commercialization. From what I've seen the models are smart enough, what we're lacking is the understanding and frameworks necessary to use them well. We've barely scratched the surface on commercialization. I'd argue there are two things coming: -> Era of Research -> Era of Engineering Previous AI winters happened because we didn't have a commercially via…

The labs can't just stop improvements though. They made promises. And the capacity to run the current models are subsidized by those promises. If the promise is broken, then the capacity goes with it.

Maybe those promises can be better fulfilled with products based on current models.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That presumes that performance improvements are necessary for commercialization. From what I've seen the models are smart enough, what we're lacking is the understanding and frameworks necessary to use them well. We've barely scratched the surface on commercialization. I'd argue there are two things coming: -> Era of Research -> Era of Engineering Previous AI winters happened because we didn't have a commercially via…

The labs can't just stop improvements though. They made promises. And the capacity to run the current models are subsidized by those promises. If the promise is broken, then the capacity goes with it.

> the capacity goes with it.

Sort of. The GPUs exist. Maybe LLM subs can’t pay for electricity plus $50,000 GPUs, but I bet after some people get wiped out, there’s a market there.

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