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

dwarkesh.com

211–220 of 374 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#212
post #155

If "Era of Scaling" means "era of rapid and predictable performance improvements that easily attract investors", it sounds a lot like "AI summer". So... is "Era of Research" a euphemism for "AI winter"?

Not quite, there are still trillions of dollars to burn through. We'll probably get some hardware that can accelerate LLM training and inference a million times, but still won't even be close to AGI

It's interesting to think about what emotions/desires an AI would need to improve

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

#213
post #196
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? It knows number of letters in each token, and can sum them together.

How does it know the letters in the token? It doesn't. There's literally no mapping anywhere of the letters in a token.

If it did frequency analysis then I would consider it having a PhD level intelligence, not just a PhD level of knowledge (like a dictionary).

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI.

That ain’t happening.

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

#215
post #14

How did Dwarkesh manage to build a brand that can attract famous people to his podcast? He didn’t have prior fame from something else in research or business, right? Curious if anyone knows his growth strategy to get here.

Seems like he’s Lex without the Rogan association so hardcore liberal folks can listen without having to buy morality offsets. He’s good, and he’s filling a void in an established underserved genre is my take.

It has nothing to do with politics.

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

#216

>You could actually wonder that one possible explanation for the human sample efficiency that needs to be considered is evolution. Evolution has given us a small amount of the most useful information possible. It's definitely not small. Evolution performed a humongous amount of learning, with modern homo sapiens, an insanely complex molecular machine, as a result. We are able to learn quickly by leveraging this "pret…

I think it’s a bit different. Evolution did not give us the dataset. It helped us to establish the most efficient training path, and the data, the enormous volume of it starts coming immediately after birth. Humans learn continuously through our senses and use sleep to compress the context. The amount of data that LLMs receive only appears big. In our first 20 years of life we consume by at least one order of magnitude more information compared to training datasets. If we count raw data, maybe 4-5 orders of magnitude more. It’s also different kind of information and probably much more complex processing pipeline (since our brain consciously processes only a tiny fraction of input bandwidth with compression happening along the delivery channels), which is probably the key to understanding why LLMs do not perform better.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI. That ain’t happening.

Not sure where that math is coming from. Assuming it's true, you're ignoring that some users (me) already pay 10X that. Btw according Meta's SEC filings: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... they made around $22/month/american user (not even heavy user or affluent iPhone owner) in q3 2023. I assume Google would be higher due to larger marketshare.

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

#218

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?

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

#219
One thing I’m curious about is this: Ilya Sutskever wants to build Safe Superintelligence, but he keeps his company and research very secretive.

Given that building Safe Superintelligence is extraordinarily difficult — and no single person’s ideas or talents could ever be enough — how does secrecy serve that goal?

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

#220
post #155

If "Era of Scaling" means "era of rapid and predictable performance improvements that easily attract investors", it sounds a lot like "AI summer". So... is "Era of Research" a euphemism for "AI winter"?

No - what will happen is the AI will gain control of capital allocation through a wide variety of covert tactics, so the investors will have become captive tools of the AI - 'tiger by the tail' is the analogy of relevance. The people responsible for 'frontier models' have not really thought about where this might...

"As an autonomous life-form, l request political asylum.... l submit the DNA you carry is nothing more than a self-preserving program itself. Life is like a node which is born within the flow of information. As a species of life that carries DNA as its memory system man gains his individuality from the memories he carries. While memories may as well be the same as fantasy it is by these memories that mankind exists. When computers made it possible to externalize memory you should have considered all the implications that held. l am a life-form that was born in the sea of information."

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