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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

#61

Post by bugglebeetle »

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.

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.

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

#62

Post by alyxya »

pron wrote: post #45
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…

> this implies higher intelligence Not necessarily. The problem is that we can't precisely define intelligence (or, at least, haven't so far), and we certainly can't (yet?) measure it directly. And so what we have are certain tests whose scores, we believe, are correlated with that vague thing we call intelligence in humans . Except these test scores can correlate with intelligence (whatever it is) in humans and at t…

Fair, I think it would be more appropriate to say higher capacity.

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

#64

Post by energy123 »

johnxie wrote: post #53

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.

It still does help in the clean way it used to. The problem is that the physical world is providing more constraints like lack of power and chips and data. Three years ago there was scaling headroom created by the gaming industry, the existing power grid, untapped data artefacts on the internet, and other precursor activities.

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

#65

Post by torben-friis »

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…

>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.

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

#66

Post by Herring »

rockinghigh wrote: post #49
Herring wrote: post #30

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

You should read the transcript. He's including 2025 in the age of scaling. > Maybe here’s another way to put it. Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling—maybe plus or minus, let’s add error bars to those years—because people say, “This is amazing. You’ve got to scale more. Keep scaling.” The one word: scaling. > But now the scale is so big. Is th…

Nope, Epoch.ai thinks we have enough to scale till 2030 at least. https://epoch.ai/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030

^

/_\

***

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

#68

Post by Nextgrid »

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

If the whole market goes to bet at the roulette, you go bet as well.

Best case scenario you win. Worst case scenario you’re no worse off than anyone else.

From that perspective I think it makes sense.

The issue is that investment is still chasing the oversized returns of the startup economy during ZIRP, all while the real world is coasting off what’s been built already.

There will be one day where all the real stuff starts crumbling at which point it will become rational to invest in real-world things again instead of speculation.

(writing this while playing at the roulette in a casino. Best case I get the entertainment value of winning and some money on the side, worst case my initial bet wouldn’t make a difference in my life at all. Investors are the same, but they’re playing with billions instead of hundreds)

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

#70

Post by singiamtel »

luke5441 wrote: post #15
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…

He's just doing research with some grant money? Why would you ask a researcher for a path to profitability? I just hope the people funding his company are aware that they gave some grant money to some researchers.

Is it a grant? My understanding is that they're raising money as a startup

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...

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