Ilya Sutskever

openai 연구소장, 수석과학자

Ilya Sutskever Did

On a Sunday, I was programming and there was knock on the door not just any knock but it was cutter. It’s sort of an urgent knock so I went and answer to door and this was young student there and he said he was cooking fries over the summer but he’d rather be working in my lab. And so I said ‘Well why didn’t you make an appointment and we’ll talk?’ And so Ilya said ‘How about now!’. And that is sort of Ilya’s character. So we talked for a bit and I gave him a paper to read which was the nature paper on back propagation. -
Geoffrey Hinton

For a week later and he came back and he said I didn’t understand it. I was very disappointed I since I though he seemed like a bright guy but it’s only the chain rule. He said “on no no I understood that. I just don’t understand why you don’t give the gradient to a sensible function optimizer” which took us quite a few years to think that. It kept on like that with a he had very good raw intuitions about things.

Ilya Sutskever 2025

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

Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutskever-2 * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/id1516093381?i=1000738363711 * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7naOOba8SwiUNobGz8mQEL?si=39dd68f346ea4d49 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 - Gemini 3 is the first model I’ve used that can find connections I haven’t anticipated. I recently wrote a blog post on RL’s information efficiency, and Gemini 3 helped me think it all through. It also generated the relevant charts and ran toy ML experiments for me with zero bugs. Try Gemini 3 today at https://gemini.google - Labelbox helped me create a tool to transcribe our episodes! I’ve struggled with transcription in the past because I don’t just want verbatim transcripts, I want transcripts reworded to read like essays. Labelbox helped me generate the *exact* data I needed for this. If you want to learn how Labelbox can help you (or if you want to try out the transcriber tool yourself), go to https://labelbox.com/dwarkesh - Sardine is an AI risk management platform that brings together thousands of device, behavior, and identity signals to help you assess a user’s risk of fraud & abuse. Sardine also offers a suite of agents to automate investigations so that as fraudsters use AI to scale their attacks, you can use AI to scale your defenses. Learn more at https://sardine.ai/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 – Explaining model jaggedness 00:09:39 - Emotions and value functions 00:18:49 – What are we scaling? 00:25:13 – Why humans generalize better than models 00:35:45 – Straight-shotting superintelligence 00:46:47 – SSI’s model will learn from deployment 00:55:07 – Alignment 01:18:13 – “We are squarely an age of research company” 01:29:23 -- Self-play and multi-agent 01:32:42 – Research taste