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

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Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.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 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 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 sardine.ai/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit 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) – SSI’s plan to straight-shot superintelligence(00:46:47) – SSI’s model will learn from deployment(00:55:07) – How to think about powerful AGIs(01:18:13) – “We are squarely an age of research company”(01:20:23) – Self-play and multi-agent(01:32:42) – Research taste Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe