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

Today, we discuss a podcast conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and Ilya Sutskever, the builder of GPT and now co-founder of SSI, regarding the trajectory of artificial intelligence. Sutskever asserts that the AI industry is moving past the **"age of scaling"**—where merely increasing data and compute yielded reliable gains—and returning to an **"age of research"** driven by new foundational ideas. The central technical challenge highlighted is that current AI **models generalize dramatically worse than humans**, a fragility evidenced by the models' high performance on evaluations contrasted with real-world errors. To address this, future research must focus on solving **generalization** and improving the efficiency of reinforcement learning through the development of robust **value functions**, which he compares to the role of emotions in human decision-making. Sutskever outlines SSI’s unique strategy as prioritizing this deep **research** to build a future superintelligence that is designed for continual learning and is **robustly aligned** to care about sentient life.