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

dwarkesh.com

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

#51

Post by aunty_helen »

jsheard wrote: post #4
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

So is the translation endless scaling has stopped being as effective?

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.

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

#52

Post by wrs »

"The idea that we’d be investing 1% of GDP in AI, I feel like it would have felt like a bigger deal, whereas right now it just feels...[normal]."

Wow. No. Like so many other crazy things that are happening right now, unless you're inside the requisite reality distortion field, I assure you it does not feel normal. It feels like being stuck on Calvin's toboggan, headed for the cliff.

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

#53

Post by johnxie »

I don’t think he meant scaling is done. It still helps, just not in the clean way it used to. You make the model bigger and the odd failures don’t really disappear. They drift, forget, lose the shape of what they’re doing. So “age of research” feels more like an admission that the next jump won’t come from size alone.

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

#54

Post by pxc »

just-the-wrk wrote: post #32
piker wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> I think its important to include that Lex is laundromat for whatever the guest is trying to sell.

This is also Rogan's chief problem as a podcaster, isn't it?

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

#55

Post by yen223 »

newyankee wrote: post #44
gizmodo59 wrote: post #5

Even as criticism targets major model providers, his inability to answer clearly about revenue & dismissing it as a future concern reveals a great deal about today's market. It's remarkable how effortlessly he, Mira, and others secure billions, confident they can thrive in such an intensely competitive field. Without a moat defined by massive user bases, computing resources, or data, any breakthrough your researchers…

Sometimes I wonder who the rational individuals at the other end of these deals are and what makes them so confident. I always assume they have something that general public cannot deduce from public statements

This looks like the classic VC model:

1. Most AI ventures will fail

2. The ones that succeed will be incredibly large. Larger than anything we've seen before

3. No investor wants to be the schmuck who didn't bet on the winners, so they bet on everything.

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

#56

Post by Animats »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #29
eats_indigo wrote: post #17

did he just say locomotion came from squirrels

I think he was referencing something Richard Sutton said (iirc); along the lines of "If we can get to the intelligence of a squirrel, we're most of the way there"

I've been saying that for decades now. My point was that if you could get squirrel-level common sense, defined as not doing anything really bad in the next thirty seconds while making some progress on a task, you were almost there. Then you can back-seat drive the low-level system with something goal-oriented.

I once said that to Rod Brooks, when he was giving a talk at Stanford, back when he had insect-level robots and was working on Cog, a talking head. I asked why the next step was to reach for human-level AI, not mouse-level AI. Insect to human seemed too big a jump. He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the creator of the world's greatest robot mouse".

He did go down in history as the creator of the robot vacuum cleaner, the Roomba.

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

#57

Post by wrs »

newyankee wrote: post #44
gizmodo59 wrote: post #5

Even as criticism targets major model providers, his inability to answer clearly about revenue & dismissing it as a future concern reveals a great deal about today's market. It's remarkable how effortlessly he, Mira, and others secure billions, confident they can thrive in such an intensely competitive field. Without a moat defined by massive user bases, computing resources, or data, any breakthrough your researchers…

Sometimes I wonder who the rational individuals at the other end of these deals are and what makes them so confident. I always assume they have something that general public cannot deduce from public statements

"Rational [citation needed] individuals at the other end of these deals"

Your assumption is questionable. This is the biggest FOMO party in history.

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

#58

Post by conception »

epistasis wrote: post #48
Herring wrote: post #30

https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com... He’s wrong we still scaling, boys.

That blog post is eight months old. That feels like pretty old news in the age of AI. Has it held since then?

It looks like it’s been updated as it has codex 5.1 max on it

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

#60

Post by pessimizer »

alyxya wrote: post #18

The impactful innovations in AI these days aren't really from scaling models to be larger. It's more concrete to show higher benchmark scores, and this implies higher intelligence, but this higher intelligence doesn't necessarily translate to all users feeling like the model has significantly improved for their use case. Models sometimes still struggle with simple questions like counting letters in a word, and most p…

> most people don't have a use case of a model needing phd level research ability.

Models also struggle at not fabricating references or entire branches of science.

edit: "needing phd level research ability [to create]"?

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