Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Yizahi » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 12:38 PM UTC

matu3ba wrote: post #295

Yizahi wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 behavio…

> 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.

I want to address this item. I think not about control or comparing something to something. I think intelligence is having at least some/any voluntary thinking. A cat can't do math or write text, but he can think on his own volition and is therefore intelligent being. A CPU running some externally predefined commands, is not intelligent, yet.

I wonder if LLM can be stepping stone to intelligence or not, but it is not clear for me.

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

#302

Post by bossyTeacher » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 12:44 PM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #158

itissid wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You think that you will be ALLOWED to continue to use AI for free once it can create a LOT of wealth? Or will you have to pay royalties? The rich CEOs don't want MORE competition - they want LESS competition for being rich. I'm sure they'll find a way to add a "any vibe-coded business owes us 25% royalties" clause any day now, once the first big idea makes some $$. If that ever happens. They're NOT trying to liberate…

This. This is what I find hilarious that even smart HN folks seem unable to understand. Transformers tech products are a service offered by private companies who are under no obligation to serve it to you indefinitely. At any given point, they are free to end public access. And you better believe that they will do so if it is in their interest. inb4 open source models, those models are also hosted on the servers of private companies who are also under no obligation to maintain public access indefinitely. And even if you were smart enough to download one in advance, cloud services providers can stop providing access for transformers and you can rest assure that your machine won't be powerful enough to run it. Plus, NVIDIA and co can just keep their GPUS to themselves and only offer subpar versions to customers.

An individual will never win a fight against a corporate entity. And certainly not one in possession of a near AGI system.

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

#303

Post by credit_guy » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 12:46 PM UTC

ares623 wrote: post #185

hiddencost wrote: post #179

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.

> They made promises.

That's not that clear. Contracts are complex and have all sorts of clauses. Media likes to just talk big numbers, but it's much more likely that all those trillions of dollars are contingent on hitting some intermediate milestones.

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

#304

Post by ionwake » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 12:50 PM UTC

gnfargbl wrote: post #284

gizmo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there fewer busy-work jobs in China? If so, why? It's an interesting assertion, but human nature tends to be universal.

less money, less adult daycare

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

#305

Post by roman_soldier » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 12:53 PM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #163

roman_soldier wrote: post #148

Scaling got us here and it wasn't obvious that it would produce the results we have now, so who's to say sentience won't emerge from scaling another few orders of magnitude? Of course there will always be research to squeeze more out of the compute, improving efficiency and perhaps make breakthroughs.

Another few orders of magnitude? Like 100-1000x more than we're already doing? Got a few extra suns we can tap for energy? And a nanobot army to build various power plants? There's no way to do 1000x of what we're already doing any time soon.

10x to 100x and order of magnitude is a factor of 10.

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

#306

Post by matu3ba » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC

Yizahi wrote: post #301

matu3ba wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 behavio…

> 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. I want to address this item. I think not about control or comparing something to something. I think intelligence is having at least some/any voluntary thinking. A cat can't do math or write text, but he can think on his own…

I like the idea of voluntary thinking very much, but I have no idea how to properly formalize or define it.

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

#307

Post by bossyTeacher » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

aunty_helen wrote: post #51

jsheard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The translation is that SSI says that SSIs strategy is the way forward so could investors please stop giving OpenAI money and give SSI the money instead. SSI has not shown anything yet, nor does SSI intend to show anything until they have created an actual Machine God, but SSI says they can pull it off so it's all good to go ahead and wire the GDP of Norway directly to Ilya.

If we take AGI as a certainty, ie we think we can achieve AGI using silicon, then Ilya is one of the best bets you can take if you are looking to invest in this space. He has a history and he's motivated to continue working on this problem. If you think that AGI is not possible to achieve, then you probably wouldn't be giving anyone money in this space.

This hinges on his company achieving AGI while he's still alive. He's 38 years old. He has about 4 decades to deliver AGI in his lifetime. When he dies, there is no guarantee whoever takes over will share his values.

"If you think that AGI is not possible to achieve, then you probably wouldn't be giving anyone money in this space." If you think other people think AGI is possible, you sell them shovels and ready yourself for a shovel market dip in the near future. Strike while the iron is hot.

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

#308

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

jebarker wrote: post #201

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This sounds magical though

Not really, this is just the way that evolution works - survival of the fittest (in the prevailing environment). Given that the world is never same twice, then generalization is a must-have. The second time you see the tiger charging out, you better have learnt your lesson from the first time, even if everything other than "it's a tiger charging out" is different, else it wouldn't be very useful!

You're really saying the same thing, except rather than call it generalization you are calling it being the same "if you use the correct similarity measures".

The thing is that we want to create AI with human-like perception and generalization of the world, etc, etc, but we're building AI in a different way than our brain was shaped. Our brain was shaped by evolution, honed for survival, but we're trying to design artificial brains (or not even - just language models!!) just by designing them to operate in a certain way, and/or to have certain capabilities.

The transformer was never designed to have brain-like properties, since the goal was just to build a better seq-2-seq architecture, intended for language modelling, optimized to be efficient on today's hardware (the #1 consideration).

If we want to build something with capabilities more like the human brain, then we need to start by analyzing exactly what those capabilities are (such as quick and accurate real-time generalization), and considering evolutionary pressures (which Ilya seems to be doing) can certainly help in that analysis.

Edit: Note how different, and massively more complex, the spatio-temporal real world of messy analog never-same-twice dynamics is to the 1-D symbolic/discrete world of text that "AI" is currently working on. Language modelling is effectively a toy problem in comparison. If we build something with brain-like ability to generalize/etc over real world perceptual data, then naturally it'd be able to handle discrete text and language which is a very tiny subset of the real world, but the opposite of course does not apply.

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

#309

Post by magicalist » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 1:12 PM UTC

jmcgough wrote: post #272

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…

Varies depending on the field and company. Sounds like you may be speaking from your own experiences? In medicine, we're already seeing productivity gains from AI charting leading to an expectation that providers will see more patients per hour.

> In medicine, we're already seeing productivity gains from AI charting leading to an expectation that providers will see more patients per hour.

And not, of course, an expectation of more minutes of contact per patient, which would be the better outcome optimization for both provider and patient. Gotta pump those numbers until everyone but the execs are an assembly line worker in activity and pay.

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

#310

Post by actionfromafar » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

menaerus wrote: post #247

krige wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn According to who, OpenAI? It is almost certain they flat out lie about their numbers as suggested by their 20% revenue shares with MS.

A bank - HSBC. Read the article.

Also interesting; https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/openai_funding_gap_hs...