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

Summary

Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Gemini 3 is the first model I’ve used that can find connections I haven’t anticipated. I recently wrote a blog post on RL’s information efficiency, and Gemini 3 helped me think it all through. It also generated the relevant charts and ran toy ML experiments for me with zero bugs. Try Gemini 3 today at gemini.googleLabelbox helped me create a tool to transcribe our episodes! I’ve struggled with transcription in the past because I don’t just want verbatim transcripts, I want transcripts reworded to read like essays. Labelbox helped me generate the exact data I needed for this. If you want to learn how Labelbox can help you (or if you want to try out the transcriber tool yourself), go to labelbox.com/dwarkeshSardine is an AI risk management platform that brings together thousands of device, behavior, and identity signals to help you assess a user’s risk of fraud & abuse. Sardine also offers a suite of agents to automate investigations so that as fraudsters use AI to scale their attacks, you can use AI to scale your defenses. Learn more at sardine.ai/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.(00:00:00) – Explaining model jaggedness(00:09:39) - Emotions and value functions(00:18:49) – What are we scaling?(00:25:13) – Why humans generalize better than models(00:35:45) – Straight-shotting superintelligence(00:46:47) – SSI’s model will learn from deployment(00:55:07) – Alignment(01:18:13) – “We are squarely an age of research company”(01:29:23) – Self-play and multi-agent(01:32:42) – Research tasteIlya Sutskever 00:00:00You know what’s crazy? That all of this is real.Dwarkesh Patel 00:00:04Meaning what?Ilya Sutskever 00:00:05Don’t you think so? All this AI stuff and all this Bay Area… that it’s happening. Isn’t it straight out of science fiction?Dwarkesh ...