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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

#291

Post by orbital-decay »

__loam wrote: post #186
orbital-decay wrote: post #132

>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…

Please stop comparing these things to biological systems. They have very little in common.

I'm talking about any processes that can be vaguely described as learning/function fitting, and share the same general properties with any other learning. Not just biological processes, e.g. human distributed knowledge distillation process is purely social.

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

#293

Post by shaism »

zombot wrote: post #292

Shouldn't research have come first? Am I making any sense?

Ilya mentioned in the video that 2012 and 2020 was the “Age of Research”, followed by the “Age of Scaling” from 2020 to 2025. Now, we are about to reenter the “Age of Research”.

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

#294

Post by latexr »

ojbyrne wrote: post #190
imiric wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is from August 2024. A lot has changed since then. Specifically, performance of SOTA models has been reaching a plateau on all popular benchmarks, and this has been especially evident in 2025. This is why every major model announcement shows comparisons relative to other models, but not a historical graph of performance over time. Regardless, benchmarks are far from being a reliable measurement of the ca…

I’m curious how you deduced it’s from 2024. Timestamps on the article and the embedded video are both November 2025.

It says at the top it was published Aug 20, 2024, and the Internet Archive has it since Nov 13, 2024.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241113185615/https://epoch.ai/...

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

#295

Post by matu3ba »

Yizahi wrote: post #283
matu3ba wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Forming deterministic actions is a sign of computation, not intelligence. Intelligence is probably (I guess) dependent on the nondeterministic actions. Computation is when you query a standby, doing nothing, machine and it computes a deterministic answer. Intelligence (or at least some sign of it) is when machine queries you, the operator, on it's own volition.

> Forming deterministic actions is a sign of computation, not intelligence.

What computations can process and formalize other computations as transferable entity/medium, meaning to teach other computations via various mediums?

> Intelligence is probably (I guess) dependent on the nondeterministic actions.

I do agree, but I think intelligent actions should be deterministic, even if expressing non-deterministic behavior.

> Computation is when you query a standby, doing nothing, machine and it computes a deterministic answer.

There are whole languages for stochastic programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_programming to express deterministically non-deterministic behavior, so I think that is not true.

> Intelligence (or at least some sign of it) is when machine queries you, the operator, on it's own volition.

So you think the thing, who holds more control/force at doing arbitrary things as the thing sees fit, is more intelligent? That sounds to me more like the definition of power, not intelligence.

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

#296

Post by AbstractH24 »

gizmo wrote: post #275
gnfargbl wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this be a problem not with AI, but with our understanding of how modern economies work? The assumption here is that employees are already tuned so be efficient, so if you help them complete tasks more quickly then productivity improves. A slightly cynical alternate hypothesis could be that employees are generally already massively over-provisioned, because an individual leader's organisational power is proporti…

You describe the "fake email jobs" theory of employment. Given that there are way fewer email jobs in China does this imply that China will benefit more from AI? I think it might.

As China’s population gets older and more middle class is this shifting to be more like America?

I really don’t know and am curious.

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

#297

Post by AbstractH24 »

pxc wrote: 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"?

> is "Era of Research" a euphemism for "AI winter"

That makes sense, because while I haven’t listened to this podcast it seems this headline is [intentionally] saying the exact opposite of what everyone assumes.

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

#298

Post by AbstractH24 »

hiddencost wrote: post #179
pxc wrote: 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"?

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 models are smart enough, what we're lacking is the understanding and frameworks necessary to use them well

That’s like saying “it’s not the work of art that’s bad, you just have horrible taste”

Also, if it was that simple a wrapper of some sort would solve the problem. Maybe even one created by someone who knows this mystical secret to properly leveraging gen AI

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

#299

Post by Deegy »

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…

That would be true in a monopolistic market. But these frontier models are all competing against each other. The incentive to 'just work and get shit done fast' is there as they each try to gain market share.

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

#300

Post by bossyTeacher »

itissid wrote: post #117
torben-friis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

We are not ready for social media. And we are definitely not ready for transformers let alone some sort of sub-AGI that is still powerful enough to complete most projects. Economies would fall quicker than the stock market on that fateful black monday. Our economies still operate on the assumption that only humans can do most of the work that delivers value. Remove that assumption, and you have nearly zero operating costs but also nearly zero revenue for virtually every single company operating mostly in the knowledge sector.
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