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

You know, it's crazy that all of this is real. Yeah, meaning, like all this AI stuff and all this Bay Area, yeah, like, isn't it straight out of science fiction? Yeah, another thing that's crazy is like how normal this low-take-off feels. The idea that we would be investing 1% of GDP in AI, like I feel like it felt like a bigger deal, you know, but right now it just feels like we get used to things free fast turns out, yeah, but also it's kind of like it's abstract, like, what does it mean? What it means that you see it in the news that such as such company announced, such and such a dollar amount, that's all you see. Right. It's not really felt in any other way so far. Yeah. 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. Well, continue being true even into the singularity. No. I don't think so. Okay. Interesting. So the thing which I was referring to, not 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, but I think that the impact of AI is going to be felt, AI is going to be defused 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 e-vals. And you look at the e-vals and you go, those are pretty hard e-vals. Right. They are doing so well. But the economic impact seems to be dramatically behind. And it's almost like it's very difficult to make sense of how can the model on the one hand do these amazing things and on the other hand, like repeat itself twice in some situation in a kind of an example would be let's say you 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? 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. And then you tell it, you have this new, the second bug and it tells you, oh my god, how could have done it? You are so right again and brings back the first bug. And you can alternate between those. And it's like, how is that possible? It's like, I'm not sure. But it does suggest that something strange is going on. I have two possible explanations. So here this is the more kind of a whimsical explanation is that maybe a real 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 that answer was everything. When you do pre-training, you need all the data. So you don't have to think, it's going to be this data or that data. But when people do a real training, they do need to think. They say, okay, we want to have this kind of a real training for this thing and that kind of a real training for that thing. And from what I hear, all the companies have teams that just produce new URL environments and just started 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 URL 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 e-vows. You say, hey, I would love our model to do really well when we release it, I want the e-vows to look great. What would be a real 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 e-vow performance and actual real world performance, which is something that we don't today exactly even understand what we mean by that. I like this idea that the real reward hacking is the human researchers who are too focused on the e-vows. I think there's two ways to understand or to try to think about 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 and coding competition. It should also be able to make the best kind of application for X thing or Y thing or Z thing. 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 a approach with let you learn from one environment and improve your performance on something else. So 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, so they will practice 10,000 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 so they became the best one of the best. Student number two thought, oh, competitive programming is cool, maybe they practiced for a hundred hours, 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 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 I 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, it's at its fingertips. And it's more intuitive that with this level of preparation, it would 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 eat 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 it exists. Yeah. I think it's interesting to distinguish it from whatever pre-training does. So one way to understand what you just said about, we don't have to choose the data in pre-training is to say, actually, it's not dissimilar to the 10,000 hours of practice. It's just that you get that 10,000 hours of practice for free because it's already somewhere in the pre-training distribution. But it's like, maybe you're suggesting actually there's actually not that much generalization of pre-training. There's just so much data in pre-training, everybody's like, it's not necessarily generalizing better than RL. Like the main strength of pre-training is that there is a so much of it and b, you don't have to think hard about what data to put into pre-training. And it's a very kind of natural data and it does include in it a lot of what people do. People's thoughts and a lot of the features of, you know, it's like the whole world as projected by people on to text. And pre-training tries to capture that using a huge amount of data. It's very, the pre-training 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-training is maybe a loose term? I don't know if I can add anything more useful on this, but I don't think there is a human analog to pre-training. Hmm. Here's analogies that people have proposed forward the human analogy to pre-training isn't I'm curious to get your thoughts on why they're potentially wrong. One is to think about the first 18 or 15 or 13 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. And then I'm curious if you think either of these are actually analogous of pre-training or how would you think about at least what lifetime human learning is like if not pre-training? I think there are some similarities between both of these to pre-training and pre-training 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, and somehow a human being after even 15 years with the tiny fraction of that pre-training data, they know much less, but whatever they do know, they know much more deeply, somehow. And the mistakes, like already at that age, you would not make mistakes that our eyes make. 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. There 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 so 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 angry, 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 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 pre-training. It's like maybe, like maybe if you're good enough at like getting everything out of pre-training, you could get 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 pre-training. What is that? Clearly not just directly emotion, it seems like some almost value function like thing, which is giving telling you wish decision to be like what the end reward for any decision should be. And you think that doesn't sort of implicitly come from I think it's good. I'm just saying it's not 100% obvious. Yeah. But what is that? Like what do you think about emotions? What is the ML analogy for emotions? It should be some kind of a value function thing. But I don't think there is a great ML analogy because right now value 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 you want to do that. I mean certainly 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 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 and 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. 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 come up with a proposed solution. That's how reinforcement learning is done naively, that's how O1, R1 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 preceded it was also bad. So the value function lets you short circuit the weight until the very end. 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 times steps previously. When you decided to pursue down the 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 cigar one paper, is that the space of trajectories is so wide that maybe it's hard to learn a mapping from an intermediate trajectory and a value. And also given that, you know, in coding, for example, you will have the wrong idea, then you'll go back, then you'll change something. This sounds like such lack of faith in deep learning. 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 using 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's the thing I was actually planning on asking you. There's something really interesting about emotions of the value 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 robust and straight-off where complex things can be very useful, but simple things are very useful in a very broad range of situations. And so I think what we've got one way to interpret what we are seeing is that we've got these emotions that essentially evolved 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 also make mistakes. For example, our emotions, well I don't know, this hunger count is an emotion, it's 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. Yeah, people have been talking about scaling data, scaling parameter, scaling compute. Is there a more general way to think about scaling? What are the other scaling axes? So the thing, so here is a perspective. Here's a perspective that I think 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-3, and suddenly everyone realized we should scale. And it's just this, this is an example of how language affects thought. Scaling is just one word, but it's such a powerful word because it informs people what to do. It's 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 pre-training 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 will 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 Right, it's much harder to invest your resources in research Compare that you know a few research so you need to have like go for three searchers and research and come up with something Versus get more data get more compute, you know, you'll get something from pre-training And indeed, you know, it looks like I based on various Things people say on some people say on Twitter, maybe it appears that Gemini have found a way to get more out of pre-training At some point they'll pre-training will run out of data the data is very clearly finite and so then okay What do you do next? I do you do some kind of a souped-up pre-training different recipe from the one you've done before or you're doing RL or maybe something else But now that compute is big Computers now very big in some sense. We are back to the age of research So maybe here's another way to put it up until 2020 from 25th from 2012 to 2020 It was the age of research Now from 2020 to 2025. It was the age of scaling or maybe plus minus let's add air bars to those years Because people say this is amazing. You got to scale more keep scaling the one word scaling But now the scale is so big Like is it is the belief really that oh, it's so big But if you had a hundred x more everything would be so different Like it would be different for sure But like is the belief that if you just honeydx 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 the computers. That's very interesting we're to put it But let me ask you the question you're just posed then what are we scaling and what is what would it mean to A recipe because I guess I'm not aware of a very clean Relationship that almost looks like a law physics which existed in pre-training does a power law between Data or computer parameters and loss what is the kind of Relationship we should be seeking and how should we think about what this new recipe might look like so We've already witnessed a transition from One type of scaling to a different type of scaling from pre-training to rl Now people are scaling rl now based on what people say on twitter They spend more compute on rl than on pre-training at this point Because rl can actually consume quite a bit of compute. Yeah, you know, you do very very long Roll-outs. Yes, so it takes a lot of compute to produce those roll-outs And then you get relatively small amount of learning power roll-out 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 stage 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 with discuss 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 it was like people say hey, let's try this and this and this let's try that and then 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 a little ms a judge and so forth you can 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 Pre-training at all and not just add more steps to the end of that process yeah So 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 you can do without just more slowly The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize Traumatically worse than people And it's super obvious That's that seems like a very fundamental thing Okay, so this is the crux 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 that 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 you they should do research You don't have to set like a verifiable reward for them That's like okay, this is the next part of their curriculum And now this is the next part of your curriculum and oh, it was this training was unstable and we get a there's not the schlepy 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 was more like continue 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 easy 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. Mm-hmm. 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 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 believe Yanlecon made the point oh like come children Learn to drive off the 16 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, but you could say maybe that's evolution too But then 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'm in to say is that language math and coding and especially math and coding Suggest 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 not sure why should that be the case so consider a skill That people exhibit some kind of great reliability or you know, um, 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 and evolutionary prior That's encoded in some very non-obvious way. Yeah, that somehow makes us so good at it 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 Mm-hmm, but then how should we think about what that is is it a matter of Yeah, what is the ML analogy for what 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 So no learning to drive a car a teenager learning at a drive a car is like not exactly getting Some pre-built verifiable reward there. It comes from their interaction With the machine and the with the environment. And yet, it takes much of your samples. It seems more unsupervised. It seems more robust. Much more robust. The robustness of people is really staggering. Yeah. So it's 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 could be, it could realize something like this? 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 learning speed of any teenager is so fast off the 10 hours, you're good to go. Yeah. This 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, what, how do we need to re-conceptualize 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 computing, 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 an opinion on, but unfortunately, circumstances make it hard to, to discuss in detail, even though nobody listens to this podcast, Ilya. Yeah. So, I have to say that prepping for Ilya was pretty tough because neither I nor anybody else had any idea what he's working on and what SSI is trying to do. I had no basis to come up with my questions. And the only thing I could go off, honestly, was trying to think from first principles about what are the bottlenecks to H.E.I. Because clearly Ilya is working on them in some way. Part of this question involved thinking about RL scaling, because everybody's asking how well RL will generalize and how we can make it generalize better. As part of this, I was reading this paper that came out recently on RL scaling, and it showed that actually the learning curve on RL looks like a sigmoid. I found this very curious. Why should it be a sigmoid? Where it learns very little for a long time, and then it quickly learns a lot, and then it asymptotes. This is very different from the power law you see in pre-training, where the model learns a bunch at the very beginning, and then less and less over time. And it actually reminded me of a note that I had run down after I had a conversation with a researcher friend, where he pointed out that the number of samples that you need to take in order to find the correct answer, scales exponentially with how different your current probability distribution is from the target probably distribution. And I was thinking about how these two ideas are related. I had the survey idea that they should be connected, but I really didn't know how. I don't have a math background. I couldn't really formalize it. But I wondered if Gemini3 could help me out here. And so I took a picture of my notebook, and I took the paper, and I put them both in the context of Gemini3, and I asked it to find the connection. And I thought a bunch, and then I realized that the correct way to model the information you gain from a single yes or no outcome in RL is as the entropy of a random binary variable. It made a graph which showed how the bits you gain for sample in RL versus supervised learning scale as a pass rate increases. And as soon as I saw the graph that Gemini3 made, immediately a ton of things started making sense to me. Then I wanted to see if there was any empirical basis to this theory. So I asked Gemini to code on my experiment to show whether the improvement in loss scales in this way with a pass rate. I just took the code that Gemini outputted, I copy-pasted it into a Google call lab notebook, and I was able to run this toy ML experiment and visualize its results without a single bug. It's interesting because the results look similar but not identical to what we should have expected. And so I downloaded this chart, and I put it into Gemini, and I asked it, what is going on here? And it came up with a hypothesis that I think is actually correct, which is that we're capping how much supervised learning can improve in the beginning by having a fixed learning rate. And in fact, we should decrease the learning rate over time. It actually gives us an intuitive understanding for why in practice, we have learning race schedulers that decrease the learning rate over time. I did this entire flow from coming up with this vague initial question to building a theoretical understanding to running some toy ML experiments all with Gemini3. This feels like the first model where it can actually come up with new connections that I wouldn't have anticipated. It's actually now become the default place I go to when I want to brainstorm new ways to think about the problem. If you want to read more about our all scaling, you can check out the blog post that I wrote with a little help from Gemini3. And if you want to check out Gemini3 yourself, go to Gemini.google. I am curious if you say we are back in the era of research. You were there from 2012 to 2020. And what is now the vibe going to be if we go back to 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 was the vibe of like you were Google and OpenAI and Sanford? These places, when there was like more of a vibe of research, what kind of thing 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. 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 the Silicon Valley saying that says that ideas are cheap, execution is everything. And people say that a lot. And there is truth to that. But then I saw someone say on Twitter something like, if ideas 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 you end them, one of them is ideas and one of them is your ability to bring them to life, which might be compute, but also engineering. So if you go back to the 90's, 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. It did not convince anyone. 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 computer 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. Alex net was built on two GPUs. That was the total amount of compute used for it. The transformer was built on 8 to 64 GPUs. No single transformer paper experiment used more than 64 GPUs of 2017, which would be like, what, two GPUs of today. So the ResNet, right, many, like even the, you could argue that the like, oh, one reasoning was not the most compute heavy thing in the world. So they're definitely 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 want to 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 asking you for the history because you were actually there. I'm not sure what actually happened, but it sounds like 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 and SSI have 50 different ideas, how will you know which one is the next transformer and which one is brittle without having the kinds of compute that other frontier labs have? - So 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 billion, which is like not small, 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, of 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 companies like OpenAI spend on the order of $5, $6 billion a year, just so far on experiments. This is separate from the amount of money they're sending on inference and so forth. So it seems like they're spending more a year of running experiments, like research experiments, the new 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, like it's the more, I think 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 workstreams. 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, maybe 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 SSI's plan still the straight start super intelligence? - 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 by the day-to-day market competition, but I think there are two reasons that make causes to change the plan. One is pragmatic if timelines turned 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. I think this is a meaningful valuable thing. - But then, so why is your default plan to straight start super intelligence? Because it sounds like, you know, open AI and theropic, 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 super intelligence directly? - So I'll make the case four and against. - Yeah. - The case four 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 difficult trade of which you need to make. And there 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 value two. And those 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. And the essay says AI is gonna be this and AI is gonna be that and it's gonna be this. And you read it and you say, okay, this is an interesting essay. - Right. - Now suppose you see an AI doing this and AI doing that, it is incomparable. Like, basically, 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 shocked. - Yeah, well, I guess it's not even that, which I do think that is an important part of it. The other big thing is, I can't think of another discipline and 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 there 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 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 paperclip are out there, but it 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 prefer for it. - Well, I think on this point, even in the stretch of scenario, you would still do a gradual release of it. It's how I would imagine it. The gradualism would be an 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, I believe you have advocated for continuing learning more than other people. 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 language affects thinking. And in this case, it will be two words, two words that have shaped everyone's thinking I maintain, first word, AGI, second word, pre-training. Let me explain. So 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 some and state of intelligence, but because it is a reaction to a different term that existed in the term is narrow AI. If you go back to ancient history of game plane AI, of checker's AI, chess AI, computer games AI, everyone would say, look at this narrow intelligence. Sure, the chess AI can beat Casper of, 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 generally AI, generally AI, that can just do all the things. The second, and that term just got a lot of traction. The second thing that got a lot of traction is pre-training, specifically the recipe of pre-training. I think the current, the way people do RL now is maybe undoing the conceptual imprint of pre-training, but pre-training had the property. You do more pre-training and the model gets better at everything, more or less uniformly, generally AI. Pre-training gives AGI. But the thing that happened with AGI and pre-training is that in some sense, the overshoot the target. Because by the kind, if you think about the term AGI, you will realize, and especially in the context of pre-training, 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 lacks a huge amount of knowledge. instead be rely on continual learning, be 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 in 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 they 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 see. So you're you're suggesting that the thing you're pointing at with super intelligence is not some finished mind, which knows how to do every single job in the economy, because the way say the original, I think opening a 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 super intelligence. 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 super human 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 super human. The other is even if that doesn't happen, if you have a single model, I mean, this is explicit revision. If you have a single model, where 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, right? 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 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. The other 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 go. So I think very rapid economic growth is possible. And we will see all kinds of things like different countries with different rules and the ones which have the frontier rules, the economic growth will be faster, hard to predict. Some people in our audience like to read the transcripts instead of listening to the episode. And so we put a ton of effort into making the transcripts read like they are standalone essays. The problem is that if you just transcribe a conversation verbatim using a speech text model, it'll be full of all kinds of fits and starts and confusing phrasing. We mentioned this problem to label locks and they asked if they could take a stab. Working with them on this is probably the reason that I'm most excited to recommend label box to people. It wasn't just, oh hey tell us what kind of data you need and we'll go get it. They walked us through the entire process from helping us identify what kind of data we needed in the first place to assembling a team of expert aligners to generate it. Even after we got all the data back, label box stayed involved. They helped us choose the right base model and set up auto QA on the models output so they could tweak and refine it. And now we have a new transcriber tool that we can use for all our episodes moving forward. This is just one example of how label box meets their customers at the ideas level and partners with them through their entire journey. If you want to learn more or if you want to try out the transcriber tool yourself, go to labelbox.com/thwarkesh. It seems to me that this is a very precarious situation to be in where look in 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. Alrighty, 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 Spears 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 know, you're hired people to SSI in six months they're 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 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 fill the AI. It's very hard to fill the AI. We can talk about it, but it's like it's like talking about like the long few like imagine like having a conversation about like how is it like to be old when you're like old 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. Well, 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. When the power is really big what's going to happen? And 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 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 got to 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 than 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 think I think for better or worse the the frontier companies we play a very important role in what happens as will the government. And the kind of things that I think you'll see which you see the beginnings of companies that are fierce competitors starting to collaborate on AI safety. You may have seen open AI 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's such a thing will happen. I also maintain that as AI continues to become 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 be done. So one thing that I maintain that will happen is that right now people who are working working on AI. I maintain 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 say this as a prediction that we will see happen. We'll see if I'm right. But I think this is something that will happen because they will 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, and I'm talking about it 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 everyone has been locked into, which is the self-improving AI. And why did it 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 to be 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 AI, there will be trillions, eventually quadrillions of AI's, 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 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 short list of ideas that then the companies when they are in the 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 capped 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 to the alignment discussion, 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 yet in the center that's more powerful or bigger? And if so, 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 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're saying hey, if you really, what is 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, you do not build an RL agent in the usual sense. And actually I'll point several things out. I think human beings are a semi-relagient, 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, it's like a very short-sighted, 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 an ever-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. Now say another thing, which is like one of the things that you could say is what that calls alignment to be difficult is that human value, that it's your ability to learn human values is fragile, then your ability to optimize them is fragile, you will 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 of generalization was much better what would happen in this case? What would be the effect? But those we can't, we can't, like those questions are right now still an answerable. - 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 AI's. How do you think about lots of continent compute size intelligences going around? How dangerous is that? How do you make that less dangerous? And how do we do that in a way that protects a equilibrium where there might be misaligned AI's 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 cities and 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 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 at equilibrium? And I think that there, the reason 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 powerfully has exist, in the short run, you could say, okay, you have a universal high income, you have a universal high income, and we all doing well. But we know that what do the Buddhists 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 government thing comes up and it functions and then after some time, it stops functioning. That's something that we 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 money for the person and you know, advocates for their needs in like the political sphere. And maybe then writes a report saying, okay, here's what I've done here, the situation, And the person. great to 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 going to 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 neural link plus plus, because what will happen as a result is that now the AI understands something and we understand it too. Because now the understanding is transmitted wholesale. So now if the AI is in some situation, now it's like you are involved in the 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 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 a 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 smarter than to understand what that is. You're still going to 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 evolution doing such a thing, but evolution also has endowed us with all these social desires. Like we really care about being seen positively by society, we care about being a good standing V like all these social intuitions that we have. I feel strongly that they're baked in and I don't know how evolution did it because it's a high level concept that'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 it should care about. How did it do it? And it did it quickly too. Because I think all these sophisticated social things that we care about, I think they evolved pretty recently. So evolution had an easy time hard coding this high level desire and I maintain or 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 is it was a desire that you learned in your lifetime. It kind of makes sense because your brain is intelligent. It makes sense why we would learn 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 want to eat that. I could imagine the genome doing that. 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 like a big chunk of your brain does. That's all I'm claiming. 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? Yeah. And it has all those brain regions. And the cortex is uniform, but the brain regions and the neurons in the cortex they kind of speak to their neighbors mostly. And that's explains why you get brain regions. Because if you want to do some kind of speech processing all the neurons that do speech need to talk to each other. 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 fire is 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 actually fully agree with that. I think there's an even stronger contra argument of this theory which is like if you think about people so there are people who get half of their brain removed in childhood. 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 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 the 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. AI tools like defects, voice clones and agents have dramatically increased the sophistication of fraud and abuse. So it's more important than ever to actually understand the identity and intent of whoever or whatever is using your platform. That's exactly what Sardine helps you do. Sardine brings together thousands of device, behavior and identity signals to help you assess risk. Everything from how a user types or moves their mouse or holds their device to whether they're hiding their true location behind the VPN to whether they're injecting a fake camera feed during KYC selfie checks. Sardine combines these signals with insights from their network of almost four billion devices, things like a user's history of fraud or their associations with other high risk accounts so you can spot bad actors before they do damage. This would literally be impossible if you only use data from your own application. Sardine doesn't stop a detection. They offer suite of agents to streamline onboarding checks and automate investigations. So as fraudsters use AI to scale their attacks, you can use AI to scale your defenses. Go to sardine.ai/thwarecache to learn more and download their guide on AI fraud detection. 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 think I have a way of approaching how to do this safely in a way that the other companies don't. What is that difference? So the way I would describe it as there are some ideas that I think are promising and I want to 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 are now to be correct, these ideas that we discussed around understanding generalization. If these ideas are now to be correct, then I think we will have something worthy. Will they be turned 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 co-founder and previously left to go to meta recently and people have asked well if there was a lot of breakthroughs being made that seems like a thing that should have been unlikely. I wonder how you respond. Yeah, so for this, I will simply remind a few facts that may have been forgotten. And I think these facts which provide the context, I think they explain the situation. So the context was that we were fundraising at a 32 billion evaluation. And then Meta came in and offered to acquire us. And I said no. But my former co-founder, I can some sense, said yes. And as a result, he also was able to enjoy from a lot of near-charmliquidity. And he was the only person from SSI to join Meta. It sounds like SSI's plan has to be a company that is at the frontier when you get to this very important period in human history where you have super human intelligence. And you have these ideas about how to make super human intelligence go well. But other companies will be trying their own ideas. What distinguishes SSI's approach to making super intelligence go well? 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, careful sentient life, careful 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's striving for. And I think that this time, if not already, all the other companies will realize that striving towards the same thing. And we'll see, I think that the world will truly change as AI becomes more powerful. And I think a lot of these forecasts will, like, I think things will be really different. And people will be acting really differently. And speaking of forecasts, what are your forecasts to this system you're describing, which can learn as well as a human. And it's absolutely as a result becomes super human. I think like 5 to 20 years. So I just want to 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 all means? Yeah. I think they're, 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 stalling out, I think this company could make a stupendous, stupendous revenue, maybe not profits because they will be, 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 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 on the technical approach is probably going to happen as well. But I was alluding to convergence to the largest strategy. So what, what exactly is the thing that should be done? I just want to better understand how you see the future and rolling. 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 the product makes it clear to other people how to do this thing. I think it won't be clear how to do it thing, but it can be clear that something different is possible. Right. And that is information. And I think people will do, they'll then be trying to figure out how that's how that works. I do think though that one of the things that I think, you know, not addressed here, not discussed is that with each increase in the AI 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, I think it's going to be important yet I can't spell out what that is exactly. And 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 will 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 look at, let's look at how things have gone so far with the AI's of the past. So one company produced an advance and the other company scrambled and produced some, some similar things after some lot 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's okay, 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 another thing we haven't discussed on the, on the spec of the super intelligent AI that I think is worth considering is that you make it narrow, can be useful in narrow at the same time. So you can have lots of narrow super intelligent AI's, 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 they've conveyed the competition is going to work through specialization. I think what's going to 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 going to have lots of different niches and you're going to have lots of different companies who are occupying different niches in, in this kind of world, we 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 than other area. And the third company is really good at litigation. And that's what it is. It's not related by what human 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 of the same. And someone else spent a huge amount of computer and 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 want to start learning what you've learned. I guess that would require many different companies to begin at the human, like, continue learning agent at the same time so that they can start their different research in different branches. But if one company, you know, gets that agent first or gets that learner first, it does then seem like, well, you know, they, like, we just think about every single job in the economy. You just have an instance learning each one seems tractable for. Yeah. That's that's that's that's a valid argument. My my strong intuition is that it's not how it's going to 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 theory, there is no difference between theory and practice and practice the reason. I think that's going to 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 super intelligence 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 they'll definitely be a, they'll be diminishing returns because you want, you want people who think differently rather than the same. I think that if they were literal 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, even 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 it'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 the eyes might have. But how do we elicit meaningful diversity among AI? So I think just raising that temperature just results in gibberish. I think you want something more like different scientists, different, different and pleasure to meet you. 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 pre-training. All the pre-training models are the same, pretty much, because the pre-training on the same data. Now, our rail 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 hinted in the past about self-play as a way to either get data or match agents to other agents equivalent intelligence to kickoff learning. How should we think about why there's no public proposals of this kind of thinking working with other ones? I would say there are two things to say. I would say that the reason why I thought self-play was interesting is because it offered the 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, let's self-play at least the way it was done in the past when you have agents which are somehow competing 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 very fire, 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 a related adversarial setup that people are doing, I believe. And really, self-lays, an example of a, is a special case of more general, like competition 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 going to 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 co-author on many of the biggest, the biggest things that have happened in the history of deep learning from Alex and that to GPT-3 and 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. It's very easy to think about how people are incorrectly, but what does it mean to think about people correctly? 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, it has the faults, but the faults probably don't matter. Why do we think that the neurons matter? Because there is many of them, it kind of feels right, so you want the neuron. You want some kind of local learning rule that will change the connections. You want some local learning rule that will change the connections between the neurons. It feels plausible that the brain does it. The idea of the distributed representation, the idea that the brain response to experience or neuron that should learn from experience, not response. The brain learns from experience, the neuron that should learn from experience. And you kind of ask yourself, is something fundamental or not fundamental? How things should be? And I think that's been guiding me a fair bit, kind of thinking from multiple angles and looking for almost beauty, beauty's 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 there is a bug. How can you tell there is a bug? How do you know if you should keep debugging or you conclude it's the wrong direction? Well, there's the top-down. Well, how should you could say the things have to be this way? Something like this has to work. Therefore, you got to keep going. That's the top-down. And it's based on this like multifaceted beauty and inspiration by the brain. All right, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Oh, all right. Appreciate it. That was great. Yeah. I enjoyed it. Yes, me too. Hey, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode. 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