Dwarkesh Podcast

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

25 Nov 2025

1h 36m

15807 words

3 speakers

25 Nov 2025

Audio

Description

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”(01:30:26) – Self-play and multi-agent(01:32:42) – Research taste Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

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Dwarkesh

Ilya Sutskever

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Transcription

Full Episode

0.031 - 3.396 Ilya Sutskever

You know what's crazy? That all of this is real.

4.278 - 5.119 Dwarkesh

Yeah, meaning what?

5.139 - 5.68 Ilya Sutskever

Don't you think so?

6.161 - 6.621 Dwarkesh

Meaning what?

6.982 - 13.352 Ilya Sutskever

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

13.853 - 27.061 Dwarkesh

Yeah. 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.

27.222 - 35.511 Ilya Sutskever

And we get used to things pretty 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.

35.852 - 36.392 Unknown

Yeah.

36.412 - 45.08 Ilya Sutskever

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.

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

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