Dwarkesh and Ilya Sutskever on What Comes After Scaling

Now that compute is big, computers are very big, in some sense we are back to the age of research. We got to the point where we are in a world where there are more companies than ideas by quite a bit. Now there is this Silicon Valley saying that says that ideas are cheap, execution is everything. What is the problem of AI and AGI? The whole problem is the power.

AI models look incredibly smart on benchmarks, yet their real world performance often feels far behind. Why is there such a gap, and what does that say about the path to AGI? From the Duarkesh Podcast, here's a rare long form conversation with Ilya Sutzkever, cofounder of SSI, exploring what's actually slowing down progress toward AGI. Duarkesh and Ilya dig into the core problems in modern AI systems, from why RL and pretraining scale so differently to why generalization, reliability, and sample efficiency still fall short of human learning. They also explore continual learning, value functions, superintelligence, and what a future economy shaped by AI might look like.

You know what's crazy? Uh-huh. That all of this is real. Yeah. Meaning what?

Don't don't you think so?

Meaning what?

Like, all this AI stuff and all this Bay Area. Yeah. That it's happened. Like, isn't it straight out of science fiction?

Yeah. It it another thing that's crazy is, like, how normal the slow takeoff feels. The idea that we'd be investing 1% of GDP in AI, like, I feel like it would have felt like a bigger deal. You know? Where right now, it just feels like

And you get used to things pretty fast turns out. Yeah. But, also, it's kinda like it's abstract. Like, what does it mean? What it means that you see it in the news Yeah.

That such and such company announced such and such dollar amount. Right. That's that's all you see. Right. It's not really felt in any other way so far.

No. Should we actually begin here? I think this is an interesting discussion. Sure. I think your point about, well, from the average person's point of view, nothing is that different will continue being true even into the singularity.

No. I don't think so. Okay. Interesting. So the thing which I was referring to, feeling different, is okay.

So such and such company announced some difficult to comprehend dollar amount of investment. Right. I don't think anyone knows what to do with that. Yeah. But I think that the impact of AI is gonna be felt.

AI is going to be diffused through the economy. There are very strong economic forces for this, and I think the impact is going to be felt very strongly.

When do you expect that impact? I think the models seem smarter than their economic impact would imply.

Yeah. This is one of the very confusing things about the models right now. How to reconcile the fact that they are doing so well on evals. Mhmm. And you look at the evals and you go, those are pretty hard evals.

Right. They're doing so well. But the economic impact seems to be dramatically behind. And it's almost like it's it's very difficult to make sense of how can the model on the one hand do these amazing things, and then on the other hand, like, repeat itself twice in some situation in a kind of a an an example would be, let's say, use vibe coding to do something, and you go to some place, and then you get a bug. And then you tell the model, can you please fix the bug?

Yeah. And the model says, oh my god. You are so right. I have a bug. Let me go fix that.

And it reduces the second bug. Yeah. And then you tell it, you have this you have this new this is second bug. Right. And it tells you, oh my god.

How could I have done it? You're so right again. And brings back the first bug. Yeah. And you can alternate between those.

Yeah. And it's like, how is that possible? Yeah. It's like, I'm not sure. But it does suggest that the something strange is going on.

I have two possible explanations. So here, this is the more kind of a whimsical explanation. Is it maybe RL training makes the models a little bit too single-minded and narrowly focused, a little bit too, I don't know, unaware, even though it also makes them aware in some other ways. And because of this, they can't do basic things. But there is another explanation, which is back when people were doing pre training, the question of what data to train on was answered because the that answer was everything.

Yeah. When you do pre training, you need all the data. So you don't have to think it's gonna be this data or that data. Yeah. But when people do RL training, they do need to think.

They say, okay. We want to have this kind of RL training for this thing and that kind of RL training for that thing. And from what I hear, all the companies have teams that just produce new RL environments and just add it to the training mix. And then the question is, well, what are those? There are so many degrees of freedom.

There is such a huge variety of RL environments you could produce. And one of the one thing you could do, and I think that's something that is done inadvertently, is that people take inspiration from the evals. You say, hey, I would love our model to do really well when you release it, I want the evals to look great. What would be RL training that could help on this task? Right?

I think that is something that happens, and I think it could explain a lot of what's going on. If you combine this with generalization of the models actually being inadequate, that has the potential to explain a lot of what we are seeing, this disconnect between eval performance and actual real real world performance, which is something that we don't today exactly even understand what what we mean by that.

I I like this idea that the real reward hacking is the human researchers who are too focused on the evals. I think there's two ways to understand or to try to think about what what you have just pointed out. One is, look, if it's the case that simply by becoming superhuman at a coding competition, a model will not automatically become more tasteful and exercise better judgment about how to improve your code base, well, then you should expand the suite of environments such that you're not just testing it on having the best performance in coding competition. It should also be able to make the best kind of application for x thing or y thing or z thing. And another, maybe this is what you're hinting at, is to say, why should it be the case in the first place that becoming superhuman at coding competitions doesn't make you a more tasteful programmer more generally?

Maybe the thing to do is not to keep stacking up the amount of environments and the diversity of environments to figure out approach with let you learn from one environment and improve your performance on something else.

So I have I have an analogy a human analogy which might be helpful. So even the case let's take the case of competitive programming since you mentioned that. And suppose you have two students. One of them work decided they want to be the best competitive programmer, they will practice ten thousand hours for that domain. They will solve all the problems, memorize all the proof techniques, and be very, very, you know, be very skilled at quickly and correctly implementing all the algorithms.

And by doing by doing so, they became the best one of the best. Student number two thought, oh, competitive programming in school, maybe they practiced for a hundred hours. Yeah. Much, much less, and they also did really well. Which one do you think is going to do better in their career later on?

The second. Right? And I think that's basically what's going on. The models are much more like the first student, but even more. Because then we say, okay.

So the model should be good with competitive programming. So let's get every single competitive programming problem ever, and then let's do some data augmentation so we have even more competitive programming problems Yes. And we train on that. And so now you got this great competitive programmer. And with this analogy, I think it's more intuitive.

I think it's more intuitive with this analogy that, yeah, okay, so if it's so well trained, okay, it's like all the different algorithms and all the different proof techniques are like right at its fingertips. And it's more intuitive that with this level of preparation, it not will not necessarily generalize to other things. But

then what is the analogy for what the second student is doing before they do the hundred hours of fine tuning?

I think it's like they have it. I think it's the it factor. Yeah. Right? And, like, I know, like, when I was an undergrad, I remember there was there was a student like this that studied with me.

So I know I know it exists.

Yeah. I think it's interesting to distinguish it from whatever pretraining does. So one way to understand what you just said about we don't have to choose the data in pretraining is to say, actually, it's not dissimilar to the ten thousand hours of practice. It's just that you get that ten thousand hours of practice for free because it's already somewhere in the pretraining distribution. But it's like maybe you're suggesting actually there's actually not that much generalization of pretraining.

There's just so much data in pretraining. But it's like, it's not necessarily generalizing better than RL.

Like, the main the main strength of pretraining is that there is, a, so much of it. Yeah. And, b, you don't have to think hard about what data to put into pretraining. And it's a very kinda natural data, and it does include in it a lot of what people do. Yeah.

People's thoughts and a lot of the features of you know, it's like the whole world as projected by people onto text. Yep. And pretraining tries to capture that using a huge amount of data. It's it's very the pretraining is very difficult to reason about because it's so hard to understand the manner in which the model relies on pre training data. And whenever the model makes a mistake, could it be because something by chance is not as supported by the pre training data?

You know, and pre support by pre training is maybe a loose term. I I don't know if I can add anything more useful on this, but I don't think there is a human analog to pretraining.

Here's analogies that people have proposed for what the human analogy to pretraining is, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on why they're potentially wrong. One is to think about the first eighteen or fifteen or thirteen years of a person's life when they aren't necessarily economically productive, but they are doing something that is making them understand the world better and so forth. And the other is to think about evolution as doing some kind of search for three billion years, which then results in a human lifetime instance. Then I'm I'm curious if you think either of these are actually analogous to pretraining, or how how would you think about at least what lifetime human learning is like if not pretraining? I think there are some similarities Yeah.

Between both of these two pretraining. Yeah. And pretraining tries to play the role of both of these. But I think there are some big differences as well. The amount of pre training data is very, very staggering.

Yes.

And somehow, a a human being after even fifteen years with a tiny fraction of that pretraining data, they know much less. Yep. But whatever they do know, they know much more deeply somehow. And the mistakes, like like already at that age, you would not make mistakes that RAIs make. Yep.

There is another thing you might say, could it be something like evolution? And the answer is maybe. But in this case, I think evolution might actually have an edge. Like, is this I remember reading about this case where some you know that one thing that neuroscientists do, or rather one way in which neuroscientists can learn about the brain is by studying people with brain damage to different parts of the brain. And and so and some people have the most strange symptoms you could imagine.

It's actually really, really interesting. And there was one case that comes to mind that's relevant. I read about this person who had some kind of brain damage that took out, I think, a stroke or an accident that took out his emotional processing. So he stopped feeling any emotion. And as a result of that, you know, he still remained very articulate, and he could solve little puzzles, and on tests, he seemed to be just fine.

But he felt no emotion. He didn't feel sad. He didn't feel anger. He didn't feel animated. And he became somehow extremely bad at making any decisions at all.

It would take him hours to decide on which socks to wear, and he would make very bad financial decisions. And that's very but does what what does it say about the role of our built in emotions in making us like a viable agent essentially? And I guess to connect to your question about pretraining, it's like maybe pre like, maybe if you are good enough at, like, getting everything out of pretraining, you can get you you could get that as well. But that's the kind of thing which seems well, it may or may not be possible to get that from pretrained.

What is that? Clearly, not just directly emotion. It seems like some almost value function like thing, which is giving telling you which decision to be like, what what the end reward for any decision should be. And you think that doesn't sort of implicitly come from

I think it could. I'm just saying it's not one it's not 100% obvious.

Yeah. But what what is that? Like, what how do you think about emotions? And what is the ML analogy for emotions? It should be some kind

of a value function thing. Yeah. But I don't think there is a greater malanalogy because right now, functions don't play a very prominent role in the things people do.

It might be worth defining for the audience what a value function is if if if you wanna do that.

I mean, certainly, I I'll be very happy to do that. Right? So so when people do reinforcement learning, the very reinforcement learning is done right now. How does it how do people train those agents? So you have a neural net, and you give it a problem.

And then you tell the model, go solve it. The model takes maybe thousands, hundreds of thousands of actions or thoughts or something, and then it produces a solution. The solution is created. And then the score is used to provide a training signal for every single action in your trajectory. Mhmm.

So that means that if you are doing something that goes for a long time, if you're training a task that takes a long time to solve, you will do no learning at all until you solve until you came up with a proposed solution. That's how reinforcement learning is done naively. That's how o one, r one ostensibly are done. The value function says something like, okay. Look.

Maybe I could sometimes, not always, could tell you if you are doing well or badly. The notion of a value function is more useful in some domains than others. So for example, when you play chess and you lose a piece, you know, I messed up. You don't need to play the whole game to know that what I just did was bad, and therefore whatever whatever preceded it was also bad. So the value function lets you short circuit the wait until the very end.

Like, let's suppose that you started to pursue some kind of okay. Let's suppose that you are doing some kind of a math thing or a programming thing, and you're trying to explore a particular solution direction. And after, let's say, after a thousand steps of thinking, you concluded that this direction is unpromising. As soon as you conclude this, you could already get a reward signal a thousand time steps previously when you decided to pursue down this path. You say, oh, next time, I shouldn't pursue this path in a similar situation long before you actually came up with a proposed solution.

This was in the Deep Seagar one paper is that the space of trajectories is so wide that maybe it's hard to learn a mapping from intermediate trajectory and value. And also given that, you know, in coding, for example, you'll have the wrong idea, then you'll go back, then you'll change something.

This sounds like such lack of faith in deep learning. Yeah. Like, I mean, sure, it might be difficult, but nothing deep learning can do. Yeah. So my expectation is that, like, value function should be useful, and and I fully I fully expect that they will be used in the future if not already.

What was I alluding to with the person whose emotional center got damaged is more that maybe what it suggests is that the value function of humans is modulated by emotions in some important way that's hard coded by evolution. And maybe that is important for people to be effective in the world.

That that's the thing I was actually gonna planning on asking you. There's something really interesting about emotions of the valley function, which is that it's impressive that they have this much utility while still being rather simple to understand.

So I have two responses. I do agree that compared to the kind of things that we learn and the things that we are talking about, the kind of as we are talking about, emotions are relatively simple. They might even be so simple that maybe you could map them out in a human understandable way. I think it would be cool to do. In terms of utility though, I think there is a thing where you know, there is this complexity robustness trade off, where complex things can be very useful, but simple things are very useful in very broad range of situations.

And so I think what what one way to interpret what we are seeing is that we've got these emotions that essentially evolved mostly mostly from our mammal ancestors, and then fine tuned a little bit while we were hominins just a bit. We do have, like, a decent amount of social emotions, though, which mammals may lack. But they're not very sophisticated. And because they're not sophisticated, they serve us so well in this very different world compared to the one that we've been living in. Actually, they they also make mistakes.

For example, our emotions well, I don't know. Does hunger count as an emotion? It's bit debatable. But I think, for example, our intuitive feeling of hunger is not succeeding in guiding us correctly in this world with an abundance of food.

Yep. People have been talking about scaling data, scaling parameters, scaling compute. Is there a more general way to think about scaling? What are the other scaling axes?

So the thing so so here here is a perspective here's a perspective I think might be might be true. So the way ML used to work is that people would just think of it with stuff and try to and try to get interesting results. That's what's been going on in the past. Then the scaling insight arrived. Right?

Scaling laws, GPT three. And suddenly everyone realized we should scale. And it's just this This is an example of how language affects thought. Scaling is what just one word, but it's such a powerful word because it informs people what to do. They say, okay, let's try to scale things.

And so you say, okay, so what are we scaling? And pre training was a thing to scale. It was a particular scaling recipe. Yes. The big breakthrough of pretraining is the realization that this recipe is good.

So you say, hey, if you mix some compute with some data into a neural net of a certain size, you will get results, and you will know that you'll be better if you just scale the recipe up. And this is also great companies love this because it gives you a very low risk way of investing your resources. Yeah. Right? It's much harder to invest your resources in research.

Compare that. You know, if you research, you need to have, like, go forth researchers and research and come up with something versus get more data, get more compute, you know, you'll get something from pretraining. And indeed, you know, it looks like I based on various things people say on to some people say on Twitter, maybe it appears that Gemini have found a way to get more out of pre training. At some point, though, pre training will run out of data. The data is very clearly finite.

Now from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling, or maybe plus minus, let's add the arrow bars to those years. Because people say, this is amazing, you gotta scale more, keep scaling, the one word scaling. But now the scale is so big, like, is is it is the belief really that, oh, it's so big, but if you had a 100 x more, everything would be so different. Like, it would be different for sure. But, like, is the belief that if you just the scale, everything would be transformed?

I don't think that's true. So it's back to the age of research again, just with big computers.

That's a very interesting way to put it. But let me ask you the question you just posed then. What are we scaling, and what what is what would it mean to have a recipe? Because I guess I'm not aware of a very clean relationship that almost looks like a law of physics, which existed in pre training as a power law between data or computer parameters and loss. What is the kind of relationship we should be seeking?

And how

how how should we think about what this new recipe might look like? So we've we've already witnessed a transition from one type of scaling to a different type of scaling, from pretraining to RL. Now people are scaling RL. Now based on what people say on Twitter, they spend more compute on RL than on pretraining at this point because RL can actually consume quite a bit of compute. Yeah.

You know, you do very, very long rollouts.

Yes.

So it takes a lot of compute to produce those rollouts. And then you get relatively small amount of learning per rollout, so you really can spend you really can spend a lot of compute. And I could imagine like, I wouldn't at this at this it's it's more like I wouldn't even call it a scale scaling. I would say, hey. Like, what are you doing?

And is the thing you are doing the the the the most productive thing you could be doing? Yeah. Can you find a most more productive way of using your compute? We've discussed the value function business earlier. And maybe once people get good at value functions, they will be using their their resources more productively.

And if you find a whole other way of training models, you could say, is this scaling, or is it just using your resources? I think it becomes a little bit ambiguous. In a sense that when people were in the age of research, back then, was like people say, hey. Let's try this and this and this. Let's try that and this and that.

Oh, look. Something interesting is happening. And I think there will be a return to that.

So if we're back in the era of research, stepping back, what is the part of the recipe that we need to think most about? When you say value function, people are already trying the current recipe, but then having LLM as a judge and so forth. You could say that's a value function, but it sounds like you have something much more fundamental in mind. Do we need do we need to go back to should we even rethink pretraining at all and not just add more steps to the end of that process?

Yeah. So the the the the discussion about value function, I think it was interesting. I want to, like, emphasize that I think the value function is something like it's going to make our realm more efficient, And I think that makes a difference. But I think that anything you can do with a value function, can do without just more slowly. Mhmm.

The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. Yes. And it's super obvious. That's that seems like a very fundamental thing.

Okay. So this is the crux of generalization, and there's two sub questions. There's one which is about sample efficiency, which is why should it take so much more data for these models to learn than humans? There's a second about even separate from the amount of data it takes, there's a question of why is it so hard to teach the thing we want to a model than to a human, which is to say, for to a human, we don't necessarily need a verifiable reward to be able to you're probably mentoring a bunch of researchers right now, and you're you know, talking with them, you're showing them your code, and you're showing them how you think. And from that, they're picking up your way of thinking and how they should do research.

You don't have to set, a verifiable reward for them. That's like, okay. This is the next part of the curriculum, and now this is the next part of your curriculum. Oh, it was this training was unstable, and we get a there's not this schleppy bespoke process. So perhaps these two issues are actually related in some way.

But I'd be curious to explore this this second thing which feels more like continual learning and this first thing which feels just like sample efficiency.

Yeah. So, you know, you could actually wonder one one possible explanation for the human sample efficiency that needs to be considered is evolution. And evolution has given us a small amount of the most useful information possible. And for things like vision, hearing, and locomotion, I think there's a pretty strong case that evolution actually has given us a lot. Mhmm.

So for example, human dexterity far exceeds I mean, robots can become dexterous too if you subject them to, like, a huge amount of training and simulation. But to train a robot in the real world to quickly, like, pick up a new skill like a person does seems very out of reach. Yeah. And here you could say, oh, yeah. Like, locomotion, all our ancestors needed a great locomotion, squirrels, like, so locomotion maybe, like, you've got, like, some unbelievable prior.

Yeah. You could make the same case for vision. You know? I I believe Jan Lecan made the point, oh, like, children learn to drive after sixteen hour after ten hours of practice, which is true. But our vision is so good.

At least for me, when I remember myself being five year old, my I was I was very excited about cars back then. And I'm pretty sure my car recognition was more than adequate for self driving already as a five year old. You don't get to see that much data as a five year old. You spend most of your time in your parents' house, so you have very low data diversity. Yeah.

But you could say maybe that's evolution too. But in language and math and coding, probably not.

It still seems better than models. I mean, obviously, models are better than the average human at language and math and coding, but are they better at the average human at learning?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. What I meant to say is that language math and coding, and especially math and coding, suggests that whatever it is that makes people good at learning is probably not so much a complicated prior, but something more, some fundamental thing.

Wait. I'm I'm not sure I understood. Why should

that be the case? So consider a skill that people exhibit some kind of great reliability or, you know Yeah. If the skill is one that was very useful to our ancestors for many millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, you could say, you could argue that maybe humans are good at it because of evolution, because we have a prior, an evolutionary prior that's encoded in some very nonobvious way Yep. That somehow makes us so good at it. Yep.

But if people exhibit great ability, reliability, robustness, ability to learn in a domain that really did not exist until recently, then this is more an indication that people might have just better machine learning period.

Mhmm. But then how should we think about what that is? Is it a matter of, yeah, what is the ML analogy for there's a couple interesting things about it. It takes fewer samples. It's more unsupervised.

You don't have to set a very like, a child learning to drive a car. Child children are not learning to drive a car. A teenager learning how to drive a car is, like, not exactly getting some prebuilt verifiable reward. They're it comes from their interaction with the machine and the with the environment. And, yeah, it takes much much fewer samples.

It seems more unsupervised. It seems more robust. Much more robust. The robustness of people is really staggering.

Yeah. So is it like, okay. And do you have a unified way of thinking about why are all these things happening at once? What is the ML analogy that would that could be could realize something like this? So so so this is where you know, one of the

things that you've been asking about is how can, you know, the teenage driver kind of self correct and learn from their experience without an external teacher? And the answer is, well, they have their value function. Right? They have a general sense, which is also, by the way, extremely robust in people. Like, whatever it is, the human value function whatever the human value function is with a few exceptions around addiction, it's actually very, very robust.

And so for something like a teenager that's learning to drive, they start to drive, and they already have a sense of how they're driving immediately, how badly they're unconfident. And then they see, okay. And they and then, of course, the the learning speed of any teenager is so fast. After ten hours, you're good to go.

Yeah. It seems like humans have some solution, but I'm curious about, like, well, how are they doing it? And, like, why is it so hard to like, how do we need to reconceptualize the way we're training models to make something like this possible?

You know, that is a great question to ask, and it's a question I have a lot of opinions about. But, unfortunately, we live in a world where not not all machine learning ideas are discussed freely, and this this is one of them. So there's probably a way to do it. I think it can be done. The fact that people are like that, I think it's a proof that it can be done.

There may be another blocker though, which is there is a possibility that the human neurons actually do more compute than we think. And if that is true, and if that plays an important role, then things might be more difficult. But regardless, I do think it points to the existence of some machine learning principle that I have no opinions on, but, unfortunately, circumstances make it hard to to discuss in detail.

Even though Nobody listens to this podcast, Sillyas. Yeah. I am curious if you say we are back in the era of research. You were there from 2012 to 2020. And do do you have What what is now the vibe gonna be if we go back in the era of research?

For example, even after AlexNet, the amount of compute that was used to run experiments kept increasing, and the size of frontier systems kept increasing. And do you think now that this era of research will still require tremendous amounts of compute? Do you think it will require going back into the archives and reading old papers? What is Maybe what was the vibe of, like, you you were at Google and, OpenAI and Stanford, these places when there was, like, a more of a vibe of research. What what what kind

of things should we be expecting in the community? So one consequence of the age of scaling is that there was this scaling sucked out all the air in the room. Yeah. And so because scaling sucked out all the air in the room, everyone started to do the same thing. We got to the point where we are in a world where there are more companies than ideas by quite a bit.

Actually, on that, you know, there is this Silicon Valley saying that says that ideas are cheap, execution is everything. And people say that a lot. Yeah. And there is truth to that. But then I saw I saw someone say on Twitter something like, if ideas are are so cheap, how come no one's having any ideas?

And I think it's true too. I think, like, if you think about a research progress in terms of bottlenecks, There are several bottlenecks. If you go back to the if if you and one of them is ideas and one of them is your ability to bring them to life Yeah. Which might be compute, but also engineering. So if you go back to the nineties, let's say, you had people who had had pretty good ideas.

And if they had much larger computers, maybe they could demonstrate that their ideas were viable, but they could not. So they could only have very, very small demonstration that did not convince anyone. Yeah. So the bottleneck was compute. Then in the age of scaling, computers increased a lot.

And, of course, there is a question of how much compute is needed, but compute is large. So compute is large enough such that it's, like, not obvious that you need that much more compute to prove some idea. Like, I'll give you an analogy. AlexNet was built on two GPUs. That was the total amount of compute used for it.

The transformer was built on eight to 64 GPUs. No single transformer paper experiment used more than 64 GPUs of twenty seventeen, which would be like what? Two GPUs of today? So the ResNet, right, many like, even even the the you could argue that the, like, o one reasoning was not the most compute heavy thing in the world. So they're definitely for for research.

You need, like, definitely some amount of compute, but it's far from obvious that you need the absolutely largest amount of compute ever for research. You might argue, and I think it is true, that if you want to build the absolutely best system, if you wanna build the absolutely best system, then it helps to have much more compute. And especially if everyone is within the same paradigm, then compute becomes one of the big differentiators.

Yeah. I guess while it was possible to develop these ideas I'm I'm asking you for the history because you were actually there. I'm not sure what actually happened, but it sounds it was possible to develop these ideas using minimal amounts of compute. But it wasn't the transformer didn't immediately become famous. It became the thing everybody started doing and then started experimenting on top of and building on top of because it was validated at higher and higher levels of compute.

Correct. And if you at SSI have 50 different ideas, how will you know which one is the next transformer and which one is, you know, brittle without having the kinds of compute that other frontier labs have?

So I can I can comment on that, which is the short comment is that, you know, you mentioned SSI? Specifically for us, the amount of compute that SSI has for research is really not that small, and I want to explain why. Like, a simple math can explain why the amount of compute that we have is actually a lot more comparable for research than one might think. Now explain. So SSI has raised 3,000,000,000, which is, like, not small, but it's, like, a lot by any absolute sense.

But you could say, but look at the other companies raising much more. But a lot of what their a lot of their compute goes for inference. Like, these big numbers, these big loans, it's earmarked for inference. That's number one. Number two, you need if you want to have a product on which you do inference, you need to have a big staff of engineers, salespeople.

A lot of the research needs to be dedicated for producing all kinds of product related features. So then when you look at what's actually left for research, the difference becomes a lot smaller. Now the other thing is is that if you are doing something different, do you really need the absolute maximal scale to prove it? I don't think it's true at all. I think that in our case, we have sufficient compute to prove to convince ourselves and anyone else that what we're doing is correct.

There's been public estimates that, you know, companies like OpenAI spend on the order of $56,000,000,000 a year, even just so far on experiments. Mhmm. This is separate from the amount of money they're sending on inference and so forth. So seems like they're spending more a year running, like, research experiments than you guys have in total funding.

I think it's a question of what you do with it. It's a question of what you do with it. Like, they have a like, is the more I think in in in their case, in the case of others, I think there is a lot more demand on the training compute. There's a lot more different work streams. There is there are different modalities.

There is just more stuff, and so it becomes fragmented.

How will SSI make money?

You know, my answer to this question is something like, we just right now, we just focus on the research, and then the answer to this question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers.

Is exercise plan still at the straight shot superintelligence?

Maybe. I think that there is merit to it. I think there's a lot of merit because I think that it's very nice to not be affected affected by the day to day market competition. But I think there are two reasons that may cause us to change the plan. One is pragmatic, if timelines turn out to be long, which they might.

And second, I think there is a lot of value in the best and most powerful AI being out there impacting the world. Yeah. I think this is a meaningfully valuable thing.

But then so why is your default plan to straight shot superintelligence? Because it sounds like, you know, OpenAI and Therapic, all these other companies, their explicit thinking is, look. We have weaker and weaker intelligences that the public can get used to and prepare for.

And why is it potentially better to build a superintelligence directly? So I'll make the case for and against. Yeah. The case for is that you are so one of the challenges that people face when they're in the market is that they have to participate in the rat race. And the rat race is quite difficult in that it exposes you to to to difficult trade offs which you need to make.

And there is it is it is nice to say we'll insulate ourselves from all this and just focus on the research and come out only when we are ready and not before. But the counterpoint is valid too. And those are those are opposing forces. The counterpoint is, hey. It is useful for the world to see powerful AI.

It is useful for the world to see powerful AI because that's the only way you can communicate it.

Well, I guess not even just that you can communicate the idea.

But Communicate the AI, not the idea. Communicate the AI. What do you

mean communicate the AI? So okay.

So let's suppose you read an essay about AI. Yeah. And the essay says AI is gonna be this, and AI is gonna be that, and it's gonna be this. Yeah. Yeah.

And you read it and you say, okay. This is an interesting essay.

Right.

Now suppose you see an AI doing this, an AI doing that, it is incomparable. Like, basically, I think I think that there is a big benefit from AI being in the public, and that would be a reason for us to not be quite straight shot.

Yeah. Well, I guess it's not even that, which I but I do think that is an important part of it. The other big thing is I can't think of another discipline in human engineering and research where the end artifact was made safer mostly through just thinking about how to make it safe, as opposed to why are airplane crashes per mile so much lower today than they were decades ago? Why is it so much harder to find a bug in Linux than it would have been decades ago? And I think it's mostly because these systems were deployed to the world.

You noticed failures. Those failures were corrected, and the systems became more robust. Now I'm not sure why AGI and superhuman intelligence would be any different, especially given and I I hope we can talk we're gonna get to this. It seems like the harms of superintelligence are not just about, like, having some malevolent paper clipper out there, but it's just like, this is a really powerful thing, and we don't even know how to conceptualize how people interact with it, what people will do with it. And having gradual access to it seems like a better way to maybe spread out the impact of it and to help people prepare for it?

Well, I think I think on this point, even in the straight shot scenario, you would still do a gradual release of it. It's how I would imagine it. The the gradualism would be an inherent inherent component of any plan. It's just a question of what is the first thing that you get out of the door. That's number one.

Number two, I also think, you know, I believe you have advocated for continual learning more than other people. Yeah. And I actually think that this is an important and correct thing, and here is why. So one of the things so I'll give you another example of how thinking how language affects thinking. And in this case, it is will be two words.

Two words that have shaped everyone's thinking, I maintain. For first word, AGI. Second word, pretraining. Let me explain. So the word the term AGI, why does this term exist?

It's a very particular term. Why does it exist? There's a reason. The reason that the term AGI exists is, in my opinion, not so much because it's like a very important essential descriptor of of of some end state of intelligence, but because it is a reaction to a different term that existed, and the term is narrow AI. If you go back to ancient history of game plan AI, of checkers AI, chess AI, computer games AI, everyone would say, look at this narrow intelligence.

Sure, the chess AI can beat Kasparov, but it can't do anything else. It is so narrow, artificial narrow intelligence. So in response, as a reaction to this, some people said, well, this is not good. It is so narrow. What we need is general AI.

General AI, an AI that can just do all the things. The second and and that term just got a lot of traction. Yep. The second thing that got a lot of traction is pre training. Specifically, recipe of pretraining.

I think the current the way people do RL now is maybe and is undoing the conceptual imprint of pretraining, but pretraining had the property. You do more pretraining and the model gets better at everything more or less uniformly. Yep. General AI. Pretraining gives AGI.

But the thing that happened with AGI in pre training is that in some sense they overshot the target. Because by the kind if you think about the term AGI, you will realize, and especially in the context of pretraining, you will realize that a human being is not an AGI. Because a human being yes. There is definitely a foundation of skills. A human being a human being lacks a huge amount of knowledge.

Instead, we rely on continual learning. We rely on continual learning. And so then when you think about, okay, so let's suppose that we achieve success and we produce a safe super some kind of safe super intelligence. The question is, but how do you define it? Where on the curve of continual learning is going to be?

I will produce like a super intelligent 15 year old that's very eager to go and you say, okay, I'm going to don't know very much at all. The great student, very eager. You go and be a programmer. You go and be a doctor. Go and learn.

So you could imagine that the deployment itself will involve some kind of a learning trial and error period. It's a process as opposed to you drop the finished thing.

Okay. I I see. So you're you're suggesting that the thing you're pointing out with superintelligence is not some finished mind, which knows how to do every single job in the economy. Because the way, say, the original, I think OpenAI Charter or whatever defines AGI is like, it can do every single job that every single thing a human can do. You're proposing instead a mind which can learn to do any single, every single job.

Yes. And that is superintelligence. And then, but once you have the learning algorithm, it gets deployed into the world the same way a human laborer might join an organization. And it seems like one of these two things might happen. Maybe neither of these happens.

One, this super efficient learning algorithm becomes superhuman, becomes as good as you and potentially even better at the task of ML research. And as a result, the algorithm itself becomes more and more superhuman. The other is even if that doesn't happen, if you have a single model I mean, this is this is explicit to your vision. If you have a single model or instances of a model, which are deployed through the economy, doing different jobs, learning how to do those jobs, continually learning on the job, picking up all the skills that any human could pick up, but actually picking them all up at the same time and then amalgamating the learnings. You basically have a model which functionally becomes super intelligent even without any sort of recursive self improvement in software.

Because you now have one model that can do every single job in the economy and humans can't merge our minds in the same way. And so do you expect some sort of, like, intelligence explosion from broad deployment?

I think that it is likely that we will have rapid economic growth. I think the broad deployment, like, there are two arguments you could make, which are conflicting. One is that, look, if indeed you get once indeed you get to a point where you have an AI that can learn to do things quickly, and you have many of them, then they will then there will be a strong force to deploy them in the economy unless there will be some kind of a regulation that stops it, which by the way, there might be. But I think the idea of very rapid economic growth for some time, I think it's very possible from broad deployment. Then the question is how rapid it's going to be.

So I think this is hard to know because on the one hand, you have this very efficient worker. On the other hand, there is the world is just really big and there's a lot of stuff. And that stuff moves at a different speed. But then on the other hand, now the AI could could, you know, so I think very rapid economic growth is possible. And we will see, like, all kinds of things, like different countries with different rules and the ones which have different year rules, the economic growth will be faster.

Hard to predict.

It seems to me that this is a very precarious situation to be in where, looking the limit, we know that this should be possible because if you have something that is as good as a human at learning, but which can merge its brains, merge their different instances in a way that humans can't merge, Already, this seems like a thing that should physically be possible. Humans are possible. Digital computers are possible. You just need both of those combined to produce this thing. And it also seems like this kind of thing is extremely, powerful, and economic growth is one way to put it.

I mean, Dyson spear is a lot of economic growth, but another way to put it is just like, you will have potentially a very short period of time because a human on the job can, you you're hiring people at SSI and six months are like net productive probably. Right? A human like learns really fast. And so this thing is becoming smarter and smarter, very fast. What is how do you think about making that go well?

And why is SSI positioned to do that well? What is SSI's plan there, basically, is what I'm trying to ask.

Yeah. So one of the one of the ways in which my thinking has been changing is that I now place more importance on AI being deployed incrementally and in advance. One very difficult thing about AI is that we are talking about systems that don't yet exist, and it's hard to imagine them. I think that one of the things that's happening is that in practice, it's very hard to feel the AGI. It's very hard to feel the AGI.

We can talk about it, but it's like it's like talking about, like, the long like, imagine, like, having a conversation about, like, how is it like to be old when you're, like, old and and frail, and you can have a conversation. You can try to imagine it, but it's just hard and you come back to reality where that's not the case. And I think that a lot of the issues around AGI and its future power stem from the fact that it's very difficult to imagine. Future AI is going to be different. It's going to be powerful.

Indeed, the whole problem what is the problem of AI and AGI? The whole problem is the power. The whole problem is the power. When the power is really big, what's gonna happen? And one of the one of the ways in which I've changed my mind over the past year and so that that change of mind may back may I'll say, I'll I'll I'll hedge a little bit, may back propagate into into the plans of our of our company is that so if it's hard to imagine, what do you do?

You gotta be showing the thing. You gotta be showing the thing. And I maintain that I think I think most people who work on AI also can't imagine it because it's too different from what people see on a day to day basis. I do maintain here's something which I predict will happen. That's a prediction.

I maintain that as AI becomes more powerful, then people will change their behaviors. And we will see all kinds of unprecedented things which are not happening right now. And I'll give some examples. I do like, I I think I think for better or worse, the the frontier companies will play a very important role in what happens as will the government. And the kind of things that I think you will see, which you see the beginnings of, companies that are fierce competitors starting collaborate to collaborate on AI safety.

You may have seen OpenAI and Anthropic doing a first small step, but that did not exist. That's actually something which I predicted in one of my talks about three years ago, that such a thing will happen. I also maintain that as AI continues to become more powerful, more visibly powerful, there will also be a desire from governments and the public to do something. And I think that this is a very important force of showing the AI. That's number one.

Number two. Okay. So then the AI has been built. What needs to what needs to be done? So one thing that I maintain that will happen is that right now, people who are working on AI, are maintaining that the AI doesn't feel powerful because of its mistakes.

I do think that at some point, the AI will start to feel powerful, actually. And I think when that happens, we will see a big change in the way all AI companies approach safety. They'll become much more paranoid. I think I I say this as a predict as a as a as a prediction that we will see happen. You'll see if I'm right.

But I think this is something that will happen because then you'll see the AI becoming more powerful. Everything that's happening right now, I maintain, is because people look at today's AI, and it's hard to imagine the future AI. And there is a third thing which needs to happen. And I think this is this this and and I'm talking about it in in broader terms, not just from the perspective of SSI, because you asked me about our company. But the question is, okay, so then what should the companies aspire to build?

What should they aspire to build? And there has been one big idea that actually that everyone has been locked into, which is the self improving AI. And why why did this happen? Because there is fewer ideas than companies. But I maintain that there is something that's better to build.

And I think that everyone will actually want that. It's like the AI that's robustly aligned to care about sentient life specifically. I think in particular, it will be there's a case to be made that it will be easier to build an AI that cares about sentient life than an AI that cares about human life alone, because the AI itself will be sentient. And if you think about things like mirror neurons and human empathy for animals, which is, you know, you might argue it's not big enough, but it exists. I think it's an emergent property from the fact that we model others with the same circuit that we used to model ourselves because that's the most efficient thing to do.

So even if you got an AI to hear about sentient beings, and it's not actually clear to me that that's what you should try to do if you solve the alignment, it would still be the case that most sentient beings will be AIs. There will be trillions, eventually quadrillions of AIs. Humans will be a very small fraction of sentient beings. So it's not clear to me if the goal is some kind of human control over this future civilization that this is the best criterion. It's true.

I I think that

it's possible. It's not the best criterion. I'll say two things. I think that thing number one. I think that if there so I think that care for sentient life, I think there is merit to it.

I think it should be considered. I think that it will be helpful if there was some kind of a shortlist of ideas that then the companies, when they are in this situation, could use. That's number two. Number three, I think it would be really materially helpful if the power of the most powerful superintelligence was somehow kept because it would address a lot of these concerns. The question of how to do it, I'm not sure.

But I think that would be materially helpful when you're talking about really, really powerful systems.

Yeah. Before we continue the alignment discussion, I I wanna double click on that. How much room is there at the top? How do you think about superintelligence? Do you think I mean, using this learning efficiency idea, maybe it's just extremely fast at learning new skills or new knowledge.

And does it just have a bigger pool of strategies? Is there a single cohesive it in the center that's more powerful or bigger? And if so, do you do you imagine that this will be sort of godlike in comparison to the rest of human civilization, or does it just feel like another agent or another cluster

of agents? So this is an area where different people have different intuitions. I think it will be very powerful for sure. I think that what I think is most likely to happen is that there will be multiple such AIs being created roughly at the same time. I think that if the cluster is big enough, like, if the cluster is literally continent sized, that thing could be really powerful indeed.

Right? If you literally have a continent sized cluster, like, those those AIs can be very powerful. And I'd like, all I can tell you is that if you're talking about extremely powerful AIs, like, truly dramatically powerful, then, yeah, it would be nice if they could be restrained in some ways or if there was some kind of an agreement or something. Because I think that if you are saying, hey. Like, if you if you really like, what what is the the concern of superintelligence?

What is one way to explain the concern? If you imagine a system that is sufficiently powerful, like really sufficiently powerful, and you could say, okay, you need to do something sensible, like care for sentient life, let's say, in a very single-minded way. We might not like the results. That's really what it is. And so maybe, by the way, the answer is that you do not build a single you do not build an RL agent in the usual sense.

And actually, I'll point I'll point several things out. I think human beings are a semi real agent. You know, we pursue a reward and then the emotions or whatever make us tire out of the reward, we pursue a different reward. The market is like kind it's like a very shortsighted kind of agent. Evolution is the same.

Evolution is very intelligent in some ways, but very dumb in other ways. The government has been designed to be a never ending fight between three parts, which has an effect. So I think things like this. Another thing that makes this discussion difficult is that we are talking about systems that don't exist, that we don't know how to build. Right?

That's the other thing. And that's actually my belief. I think what people are doing right now will go some distance and then peter out. It will continue to improve, but it will also not be it. So the it, we don't know how to build.

And I think that a lot hinges on understanding reliable generalization. And I'll say another thing, which is like you know, one of the things that you could say is what would that cause alignment to be difficult is that human value that it's it's your ability to learn human values is fragile, then your ability to optimize them is fragile. You will you actually learn to optimize them. And then can't you say, are these not all instances of unreliable generalization? Why is it that human beings appear to generalize so much better?

What if generalization was much better? What would happen in this case? What would be the effect? But those we can't we we can't but those questions are right now still unanswerable.

How does one think about what AI going well looks like? Because I think you've scoped out how AI might evolve. We'll have these sort of continual learning agents. AI will be very powerful. Maybe there will be many different AIs.

How do you think about lots of continent compute size intelligences going around? How dangerous is that? How do we make that less dangerous? And how do we do that in a way that protects a equilibrium where there might be misaligned AIs out there and bad actors out there?

So one reason why I liked the AI that cares for sentient life, you know, and we can debate on whether it's good or bad. But if the first N of these dramatic systems actually do care for, you know, love humanity or something, you know, care for sentient life. Obviously, this also needs to be achieved. This needs to be achieved. So if this is achieved by the first n of those systems, then then I can see it go well, at least for quite some time.

And then there is the question of what happens in the long run. What happens in the long run? How do you achieve a long run equilibrium? And I think that there there is an answer as well, and I don't like this answer, but it needs to be considered. In the long run, you might say, okay.

So if you have a world where powerful AIs exist, in the short term, you could say, okay, you have a universal high income. You have universal high income, and we're all doing well. But we know that what do the Buddhist say? Change is the only constant. And so things change.

And there is some kind of government political structure thing, and it changes because these things have a shelf life. You know, some new new government thing comes up and it functions, and then after some time, it stops functioning. That's something that you see happening all the time. And so I think that for the long run equilibrium, one approach, you could say, okay, so maybe every person will have an AI that will do their bidding, and that's good. And if that could be maintained indefinitely, that's true.

But the downside with that is, okay, so then the AI goes and, like, earns earn earn you know, earns money for for the person and, you know, advocates for their needs in, like, the political sphere, and maybe then writes a little report saying, okay. Here's what I've done. Here's the situation. And the person says, great. Keep it up.

But the person is no longer a participant. And then you can say that's a precarious place to be in. But so I'm gonna preface by saying, I don't like this solution, but it is a solution. And the solution is if people become part AI with some kind of Neuralink plus plus. Because what will happen as a result is that now the AI understands something, and we understand it too.

Like because now the understanding is transmitted wholesale. So now if the AI is in some situation, now it's like you are involved in that situation yourself fully. And I think this is the answer to the equilibrium.

I wonder if the fact that emotions which were developed millions or, in many cases, billions of years ago in a totally different environment are still guiding our actions so strongly is an example of alignment success. And to maybe spell out what I mean, the brainstem has these I don't know if it's more accurate to call it a value function or reward function, but the brainstem has a directive where it's saying, mate with somebody who's more successful. The cortex is the part that understands what does success mean in the modern context. But the brainstem is able to align the cortex and say, however you recognize success to be, and I'm not smart enough to understand what that is, you're you're still gonna pursue this directive.

I think I think there is so I think there's a more general point. I think it's actually really mysterious how the brain encodes high level desires. Sorry, how evolution encodes high level desires. Like, it's pretty easy to understand how evolution would endow us with the desire for food that smells good. Because smell is a chemical, and so just pursue that chemical.

It's very easy to imagine such a evolution doing such a thing. But evolution also has has endowed us with all these social desires. Like, we we really care about being seen positively by society. We care about being in a good standing. We like, all these social intuitions that we have, I feel strongly that they are baked in, and I don't know how evolution did it because it's a high level concept.

It's represented in the brain. Like, what people think like, let's say you are like, you care about some social thing. It's not like a low level signal like smell. It's not something that for which there is a sensor. Like, the brain needs to do a lot of processing to piece together lots of bits of information to understand what's going on socially, And somehow evolution said, that's what you should care about.

Yes. How did he do it? And he did it quickly too. Yeah. Because I think all these sophisticated social things that we care about, I think they evolved pretty recently.

Yeah. So evolution had an easy time hard coding this high level desire. And I maintain, or, you know, at least I'll say, I'm unaware of good hypothesis for how it's done. I had some ideas I was kicking around, but none of them are satisfying.

Yeah. And what's especially impressive was it was a desire that you learned in your lifetime. It kinda makes sense because your brain is intelligent. It makes sense why we would have learned intelligent desires. But your point is that the desire is maybe this is not your point, but one way to understand it is the desire is built into the genome and the genome is not intelligent.

Right? But it's able to you're somehow able to describe this feature that requires like, it's not even clear how you define that feature, and you can get it into the you can build it into the genes.

Yeah. Essentially. Or maybe I'll put it differently. If you think about the tools that are available to the genome, It says, okay, here's a recipe for building a brain, and you could say, here is a recipe for connecting the dopamine neurons to, like, the smell sensor. Yeah.

And if the smell is a certain kind of, you know, good smell, you wanna eat that. I could imagine the genome doing that. I'm I'm claiming that it is harder to imagine. It's harder to imagine the genome saying you should care about some complicated computation that your entire brain that's like a big chunk of your brain does. That's all I'm claiming.

I I can tell you, like, a speculation. I was wondering how it could be done. And let me offer a speculation, and I'll explain why the speculation is probably false. So the speculation is okay. So the brain, it's like the brain has those regions.

You know the brain regions? We have our cortex. Right? Yep. And there's all those brain regions.

And the cortex is uniform, but the brain regions and and and the neurons in the cortex, they kinda speak to their neighbors mostly. And that explains why you get brain regions. Because if you wanna do some kind of speech processing, all the neurons that do speech need to talk to each other. And they can and because neurons can only speak to their nearby neighbors, for the most part, it has to be a region. All the regions are mostly located in the same place from person to person.

So maybe evolution hard coded literally a location on the brain. So it says, oh, like, when when, like, you know, the GPS of the brain, GPS coordinates such and such, when that fires, that's what you should care about. Like, maybe that's what evolution did because that would be within the toolkit of evolution.

Yeah. Although there are examples where, for example, people who are born blind have that area of their cortex adopted by another sense. And I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if the desires or the reward functions which require visual signal no longer worked. You know, people who have their different areas of their cortex co opted. For example, if you no longer have vision, can you still feel the sense that I want people around me to like me and so forth, which usually there's also visual cues for.

So I actually fully agree with that. I I think there's an even stronger counterargument to the theory, which is like, if you think about people, so there are people who get half of their brains removed in childhood. Yeah. And they still have all their brain regions, but they all somehow move to just one hemisphere, which suggests that the brain regions the location is not fixed. Yeah.

And so that theory is not true. It would have been cool if it was true, but it's not. And so I think that's a mystery, but it's an interesting mystery. Like, fact is somehow evolution was able to endow us to care about social stuff very, very reliably. And even people who have, like, all kinds of strange mental conditions and deficiencies and emotional problems tend to care about this also.

What is SSI planning on doing differently? So presumably, your plan is to be one of the frontier companies when this time arrives. And then what is presumably, you started SSI because you're like, I I think I have a way of approaching how to do this safely in a way that the other companies don't. What what is that difference? So the way I

would describe it as there are some ideas that I think are promising, and I wanna investigate them and see if they are indeed promising or not. It's really that simple. It's an attempt. I think that if the ideas turn out to be correct, these ideas that we discussed around understanding generalization. If these ideas turn out to be correct, then I think we will have something worthy.

Will it turn out to be correct? We are doing research. We are squarely age of research company. We are making progress. We've actually made quite good progress over the past year, but we need to keep making more progress, more research.

And that's how I see it. I see it as an attempt to be an attempt to be a voice and a participant.

People have asked your cofounder and previous CEO left to go to Meta recently, and people have asked, well, if there was a lot of breakthroughs being made, that seems like a a thing that should have been unlikely. I wonder how you respond.

Yeah. So I and for for this, I will simply remind a few facts that may have been forgotten. And I think these these facts which provide the context, I think they explain the situation. So the context was that we were fundraising at a 32,000,000,000 valuation, and then Meta came in and offered to acquire us. And I said, no.

But my former co founder, like in some sense said, yes. And as a result, he also was able to enjoy from a lot of near term liquidity, and he was the only person from SSI to join Meta.

It sounds like SSI's plan is to be a company that is at the frontier when you get to this very important period in human history where you have superhuman intelligence and you have these ideas about how to make superhuman intelligence go well, but other companies will be trying their own ideas. What distinguishes SSI's approach to making superintelligence go well? The the main thing that distinguishes SSI is its technical approach. So we have a

different technical approach that I think is worthy, and we are pursuing it. I maintain that in the end, there will be a convergence of strategies. So I think there will be a convergence of strategies where at some point, as AI becomes more powerful, it's going to become more or less clearer to everyone what the strategy should be. And it should be something like, yeah, you need to find some way to talk to each other, and you want your first actual, like, real super intelligent AI to be aligned and somehow be, you know, care for sentient life, care for people, democratic, one of those, some combination of thereof. And I think this is the condition that everyone should strive for.

And that's what the SSI is striving for. And I think that this time, if not already, all the other companies will be realizing that they're striving towards the same thing. And we'll see. I think that the world will truly change as AI becomes more powerful. Yeah.

And I think a lot of these forecasts will like, I think things will be really different, and people will be acting really differently.

What speaking of forecast, what are your forecast to this system you're describing which can learn as well as a human and subsequently, as a result, becomes superhuman?

I think, like, five to twenty.

Five to twenty years? Mhmm. So I just wanna unroll your how you might see the world coming. It's like, we have a couple more years where these other companies are continuing the current approach and it stalls out. And stalls out here, meaning they earn no more than low hundreds of billions in revenue.

Or how do you think about what stalling out means?

Yeah. I think the rep I think it could I think it could stall out, and I think stalling out will look like it will all look very similar Yeah. Among all the different companies, something like this. I'm not sure because I think I think I think even with I think even I think even with Stolonyou, I think these companies could make a stupendous stupendous revenue. Maybe not profits because they will be it it will be they will need to work hard to differentiate each other from themselves, but revenue definitely.

But there's something in your model implies that the when the correct solution does emerge, there will be convergence between all the companies. And I'm curious why you think that's the case.

Well, I was talking more about convergence on their largest strategies. I think eventual convergence of the technical approach is probably gonna happen as well. But I think I was alluding to convergence to the largest strategy. So what what what exactly is the thing that should be done?

I I just wanna be a better understand how you see the future enrolling. So currently we have these different companies and you expect their approach to continue generating revenue. Yes. But not get to this human like learner. Yes.

So now we have these different forks of companies. We have you, we have thinking machines, there's a bunch of other labs. Yes. And maybe one of them figures out the correct approach.

But

then the release of their product makes it clear to other people how to do

this thing. I think it won't be clear how to do its thing, but it can be clear that something different is possible. Right. And that is information. And I think people will will then be trying to figure out how how that's how that works.

I do think, though, that one of the things that's that I think, you know, not addressed here, not discussed is that with each increase in the AI's capabilities, I think there will be some kind of changes, but I don't know exactly which ones in how things are being done. And so, like, think it's going to be important, yet I can't spell out what that is exactly.

And how how are the by default, you would expect the company that has the model company that has that model to be getting all these gains because they have the model that is learning how to do all has the skills and knowledge that it's building up in the world. What is the reason to think that the benefits of that would be widely distributed and not just end up at whatever model company gets this continuous learning loop going first?

Like, I think that empirically what happened so here here is what I think is going to happen. Number one, I think empirically when let's let's let's look at let's look at how things have gone so far with the AIs of the past. So one company produced an advance, and the other company scrambled and produced some competitive some some similar things after some amount of time. And they started to compete in the market and push their push the prices down. And so I think from the market perspective, I think something similar will happen there as well.

Even if someone okay. We are talking about the good world, by the way, where what's the good world? What's the good world? Where we have these powerful human like learners that are also like and by the way, maybe there's there's another thing we haven't discussed on the on the the spec of the superintelligent AI that I think is worth considering is that you make it narrow, can be useful and narrow at the same time. So you can have lots of narrow superintelligent AIs.

But suppose you have many of them, and you have some and you have some company that's producing a lot of profits from it, and then you have another company that comes in and starts to compete. And the way the competition is going to work is through specialization. I think what's gonna happen is that the way competition like competition loves specialization. And you see it in the market, you see it in evolution as well. So you're gonna have lots of different niches, and you're gonna have lots of different companies who are occupying different niches in in this kind of world where you might say, yeah, like one AI company is really quite a bit better at some area of really complicated economic activity, and a different company is better at another area.

And the third company is really good at litigation and But that is only

one that's contradicted by what human like learning implies? Is that,

like, it can learn? It can, but but you have accumulated learning. You have a big investment. You spent a lot of compute to become really, really, really good, really phenomenal at this thing. And someone else spent a huge amount of computing, a huge amount of experience to get really, really good at some other thing.

Right. You apply a lot of human learning to get there, but now, like, you you are you are at this high point where someone else would say, look. Like, I don't wanna start learning what you've learned to do this.

That would require many different companies to begin at the human like continual learning agent at the same time so that they can start their different research in different branches. But if one company gets that Asian first or gets that learner first, it does then seem like, well, if you just think about every single job in the economy, You just have instance learning each one seems tractable for

a company. That's the the that's that's a valid argument. My my strong intuition is that it's not how it's gonna go. My strong intuition is that, yeah, like, the argument says it will go this way. Yeah.

But my strong intuition is that it will not go this way. That this is the you know, in in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. And I think that's gonna be one of those.

A lot of people's models of recursive self improvement literally explicitly state we will have a million ilias in a server that are coming up with different ideas, and this will lead to a superintelligence emerging very fast. Do you have some intuition about how parallelizable the thing you are doing is? How how what are the gains from making copies of Ilya?

I don't know. I think I think there'll definitely be a there'll be diminishing returns because you want you want people who think differently rather than the same. I think that if they were little copies of me, I'm not sure how much more incremental value you'd get. I think that but people who think differently, that's what you want.

Why is it that it's been if you look at different models, released by totally different companies trained on potentially non overlapping data sets, it's actually crazy how similar LLMs are to

each other. Maybe the data sets are not as non overlapping as it seems.

But there's there's some sense that there's, like, even if an individual human might be less productive than the future AI, maybe there's something to the fact that human teams have more diversity than teams of AIs might have, but how do we elicit meaningful diversity among AI? So I think just raising the temperature just results in gibberish. I think you want something more like different scientists have different different prejudices or different ideas. How do you get that kind of diversity among AI agents?

So the reason there has been no diversity, I believe, is because of pretraining. All the pretrained models are the same, pretty much, because it's pretrained on the same data. Now RL and post training is where some differentiation starts to emerge because different people come up with different RL training.

Yeah. And then I've heard you hint in the past about self play as a way to either get data or match agents to other agents with equivalent intelligence to kickoff learning. How should we think about why there's no public proposals of this kind

of thing working with LLMs? I would say there are two things to say. I would say that the reason why I thought self playful is interesting is because it offered a way to create models using compute only without data. Right? And if you think that data is the ultimate bottleneck, then using compute only is very interesting.

So that's what makes it interesting. Now the thing is that self play, at least the way it was done in the past when you have agents which somehow compete with each other, it's only good for developing a certain set of skills. It is too narrow. It's only good for, like, negotiation, conflict, certain social skills, strategizing, that kind of stuff. And so if you care about those skills, then self play will be useful.

Now, actually, I think that self play did find a home, but just in a different form in a different form. So things like debate, prove a verifier, you have some kind of an LLM as a judge, which is also incentivized to find mistakes in your work. You could say this is not exactly self play, but this is, you know, a related adversarial setup that people are doing, I believe. And really self play is an example of is a special case of more general, like, competition between between agents. Right?

The response the natural response to competition is to try to be different. And so if you were to put multiple agents and you tell them, you know, you all need to work on some problem, and you are an agent, and you're inspecting what everyone else is working, you're gonna say, well, if they're already taking this approach, it's not clear I should pursue it. I should pursue something differentiated. And so I think that something like this could also create an incentive for a diversity of approaches. Yeah.

Final question.

What is research taste? You're obviously the person in the world who is considered to have the best taste in doing research in AI. You were the coauthor on many of the biggest the biggest things that have happened in the history of deep learning from AlexNet to g p t three to so on. What is it that how do you characterize how you come up with these ideas?

I can answer so I can comment on this for myself. I think different people do it differently. But one thing that guides me personally is an aesthetic of how AI should be by thinking about how people are, but thinking correctly. Like, it's very easy to think about how people are incorrectly. But what does it mean to think about people correctly?

Yeah. So I'll give you some examples. The idea of the artificial neuron is directly inspired by the brain, and it's a great idea. Why? Because you say, sure.

The brain has all these different organs. That's the folds, but the folds probably don't matter. Why do we think that the neurons matter? Because there's many of them. It kinda feels right, so you want the neuron.

Yeah. You want some kinda local learning rule that will change the connections. You want some local learning rule rule that will change the connections between the neurons. Right? It feels possible that the brain does it.

The idea of the distributed representation. The idea that the brain, you know, the brain responds to experience, our neural net should learn from experience, not response. The brain learns from experience, the neural net should learn from experience. And you kinda ask yourself, is something fundamental or not fundamental? How things should be?

Yeah. And I think that's been guiding me a fair bit, kind of thinking from multiple angles and looking for almost beauty, beauty simplicity, ugliness, there's no room for ugliness. It's just beauty, simplicity, elegance, correct inspiration from the brain. And all of those things need to be present at the same time. And the more they are present, the more confident you can be in a top down belief.

And then the top down belief is the thing that sustains you when the experiments contradict you. Because if you just trust the data all the time, well, sometimes you can be doing a correct thing, but there's a bug. But you don't know that there is a bug. How can you tell that there is a bug? How do you know if you should keep debugging or you conclude it's the wrong direction?

Well, it's the top down. Well, how should you can say the things have to be this way. Right. Something like this has to work. Therefore, we gotta keep going.

That's the top down. And it's based on this, like, multifaceted beauty and inspiration by the brain.

Alright. We'll leave it there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Alright. Appreciate it.

That was great.

Yeah. I enjoyed it.

Yes. Me too.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the a 60 z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on x at a sixteen z, and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

This information is educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by Ah Capital Management LLC, A16z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16z does not guarantee its accuracy.