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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

#91

Post by asolove »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #84
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #78

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scali…

I think the problem with that is that Grok has likely been prompted to do that in the system prompt or some prompts that get added for questions about Elon. That doesn't reflect on the actual reasoning or generalization abilities of the underlying model most likely.

Yes it does.

Today on X, people are having fun baiting Grok into saying that Elon Musk is the world’s best drinker of human piss.

If you hired a paid PR sycophant human, even of moderate intelligence, it would know not to generalize from “say nice things about Elon” to “say he’s the best at drinking piss”.

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

#92

Post by polishdude20 »

SilverElfin wrote: post #7

How did Dwarkesh manage to build a brand that can attract famous people to his podcast? He didn’t have prior fame from something else in research or business, right? Curious if anyone knows his growth strategy to get here.

Maybe he's an Industry plant

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

#93

Post by l5870uoo9y »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #84
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #78

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scali…

I think the problem with that is that Grok has likely been prompted to do that in the system prompt or some prompts that get added for questions about Elon. That doesn't reflect on the actual reasoning or generalization abilities of the underlying model most likely.

You can also give AI models Nobel-prize winning world literature and ask why this is bad and they will tear apart the text, without ever thinking "wait this is some of the best writing produced by man".

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

#94

Post by Nextgrid »

yen223 wrote: post #55
newyankee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aka gambling.

The difference is that while gambling has always been a thing on the sidelines, nowadays the whole market is gambling.

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

#95

Post by pron »

delichon wrote: post #33

If the scaling reaches the point at which the AI can do the research at all better than natural intelligence, then scaling and research amount to the same thing, for the validity of the bitter lesson. Ilya's commitment to this path is a statement that he doesn't think we're all that close to parity.

I agree with your conclusion but not with your premise. To do the same research it's not enough to be as capable as a human intelligence; you'd need to be as capable as all of humanity combined. Maybe Albert Einstein was smarter than Alexander Fleming, but Einstein didn't discover penicillin.

Even if some AI was smarter than any human being, and even if it devoted all of its time to trying to improve itself, that doesn't mean it would have better luck than 100 human researchers working on the problem. And maybe it would take 1000 people? Or 10,000?

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

#96

Post by almostdeadguy »

yen223 wrote: post #55
newyankee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the money flowing to the big players is from tech giant capex, originally from net cash flow and lately its financed by debt. A lot of these investors seem to now essentially be making the case that AI is "too big to fail". This doesn't at all resemble VC firms taking a lot of small bets across a sector.

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

#97

Post by inesranzo »

SilverElfin wrote: post #7

How did Dwarkesh manage to build a brand that can attract famous people to his podcast? He didn’t have prior fame from something else in research or business, right? Curious if anyone knows his growth strategy to get here.

One word.

Consistency.

You can just do things.

Don't stop.

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

#98

Post by bugglebeetle »

Havoc wrote: post #89
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #78

> These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. The whole mess surrounding Grok's ridiculous overestimation of Elon's abilities in comparison to other world stars, did not so much show Grok's sycophancy or bias towards Elon, as it showed that Grok fundamentally cannot compare (generalize) or has a deeper understanding of what the generated text is about. Calling for more research and less scali…

There’s no way that wasn’t specifically prompted.

To be fair, it could’ve been post-trained into the model as well…

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

#99

Post by Nextgrid »

fragmede wrote: post #20
SilverElfin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mira was a PM who somehow was at the right place at the right time. She isn’t actually an AI expert. Ilya however, is. I find him to be more credible and deserving in terms of research investment. That said, I agree that revenue is important and he will need a good partner (another company maybe) to turn ideas into revenue at some point. But maybe the big players like Google will just acquire them on no revenue to ge…

That’s kind of a shitty way to put it. Mira wasn’t a PM at OpenAI. She was CTO and before that VP of Engineering. Prior to OpenAI she was an engineer at Tesla on the Model X and Leap Motion. You’re right that she’s not a published ML researcher like Ilya, but "right place, right time" undersells leading the team that shipped ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4.

“CTO” during ZIRP means nothing to be fair. You could put a monkey in front of a typewriter in that environment and still get a 50% chance of success, by the success metric of the time which was just “engagement” instead of profits. If you’re playing with infinite money it’s hard to lose.

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

#100

Post by GoodOldNe »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #34
SilverElfin wrote: post #7

How did Dwarkesh manage to build a brand that can attract famous people to his podcast? He didn’t have prior fame from something else in research or business, right? Curious if anyone knows his growth strategy to get here.

He's the best interviewer I ever found, try listening to his first couple episodes - they're from his dorm or something. If you can think of a similar style and originality in questioning I'd love a suggestion!

Sean Evans. :)
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