If I remember correctly after leaving OpenAI with a bang Ilya founded a company and attracted billions of $$ promising AGI soon. Now what?
Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
351–360 of 374 posts
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think its important to include that Lex is laundromat for whatever the guest is trying to sell. Dwarkesh does an impressive amount of background and speaks with experts about their expertise.
His recent conversation with Sutton suggests otherwise. Friedman is a vapid charlatan par excellence. Dwarkesh suffers from a different problem, where, by rubbing shoulders with experts, he has come to the mistaken belief that he possesses expertise, absent the humility and actual work that would entail.
Yup, Dwarkesh needs to broaden his intellectual scope, and the Sutton interview completely exposed the echo chamber he's been inhabiting. There is no certainty in science, and I don't think building 'AGI' will be any exception.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think that more minutes of contact is better for anybody.
As a patient, I want to spend as little time with a doctor as possible and still receive maximally useful treatment.
As a doctor, I would want to extract maximal comp from insurance which I don't think is tied time spent with the patient, rather to a number of different treatments given.
Also please note that in most western world medical personnel is currently massively overprovisioned and so reducing their overall workload would likely lead to better result per treatment given.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#354I 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…
I actually thought the opposite - that he seems to be seriously thinking about AGI from a broader intellectual standpoint than most ML researchers. With that said, I was a little confused when he said evolution was more optimized for locomotion/vision than language. Like yes, language is super recent, but communication in general is not.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. If you "create demand", it usually just means people are spending on the thing you provide, and consequently less on something else. Ultimately it goes back to a few basic needs, something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And then there's followup needs, such as "if I need to get somewhere to have a social life, I have a need for transportation following from that". A long chain of such follow-up needs gives…
It's not a zero sum game. Think, an agronomist visits a farm, instructs to cut a certain plant for the animals to eat at a certain height instead of whenever, the plant then provides more food for the animals to eat exclusively due to that, no other input in the system, now the animals are cheaper to feed, so more profit to the farmer and cheaper food to people. How would this be zero sum?
Who will eat the extra meat if the population has reached parity?
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. If you "create demand", it usually just means people are spending on the thing you provide, and consequently less on something else. Ultimately it goes back to a few basic needs, something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And then there's followup needs, such as "if I need to get somewhere to have a social life, I have a need for transportation following from that". A long chain of such follow-up needs gives…
It's not a zero sum game. Think, an agronomist visits a farm, instructs to cut a certain plant for the animals to eat at a certain height instead of whenever, the plant then provides more food for the animals to eat exclusively due to that, no other input in the system, now the animals are cheaper to feed, so more profit to the farmer and cheaper food to people. How would this be zero sum?
It would be if demand was limited. Let's assume the people already have enough food, and the population is not growing - that was my premise. Through innovation, one farmer can grow more than all the others.
Since there already was enough food, the market is saturated, so it would effectively reduce the price of all food. This would change the ratio so that the farmer who grows more gets more money in total, and every other farmer gets a bit less.
As long as there is any sort of growth involved - more people, more appetite, whatever, it would be value creation. But without growth, it's not.
At least not in the economical sense. Saving resources and effort that goes into producing things is great for society, on paper. But with the economic system that got us this far, we have no real mechanism for distributing the gains. So we get over supplying producers fighting over limited demand.
The world is several orders of magnitude more complex than that example, of course. But that's the basic idea.
That said, I'm not exactly an economist, and considering it's a bleak opinion to hold, I'd like to learn something based on which I could change it.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no level of abstraction to go up sans context. Again, let me repeat myself as well: the calculator and the arithmometer do the same things -- from the point of view of the cleric that needs to add and subtract quickly. Otherwise they are simply two completely different objects. And we will have a hard time making correct inferences about how one works based only on how we know the other works, or, e.g. how c…
> Otherwise they are simply two completely different objects. That's where you're wrong. Both objects reflect the same mathematical operations in their structure. Even if those were inscrutable alien artifacts to you, even if you knew nothing about who constructed them, how or why? If you studied them, you would be able to see the similarities laid bare. Their inputs align, their outputs align. And if you dug deep en…
You are making the false assumption that if output can be inferred from structure, the converse is true as well. Similarity in behaviour does not in any way, shape or form imply structural similarity. The boy scout, the migrating swallow, the foraging bee, and the mobile robot are good at orienteering. Do they achieve this goal in a similar manner? Not really.
Re: "I'm baffled that someone in CS, a field ruled by applied abstraction, has to be explained over and over again that abstraction is a thing that exists". Computer science deals with models of computation. You are making a classic mistake in confusing models for the real things they are capable of modelling.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/...
Sorry, I didn't follow the thread, thought you were referring to the top level article.
I’m not the person you originally asked.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#359Earlier 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.
Thank god. The fake search results, the money that manipulates our access to information. all gone. Finally we can try something else. I have a feeling it's going to be worse though.
Re: Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
#360Earlier 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…
I don’t think the models are smart at all. I can have a speculative debate with any model about any topic and they commit egregious errors with an extremely high density. They are, however, very good at things we’re very bad at.
Have you considered the AI is right, and you make the mistakes?