Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedIlya Sutskever: belief
25 Nov 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
“I think there are some similarities between both of these and pre-training, and pre-training tries to play the role of both of these.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ilya Sutskever
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 25 Nov 2025
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Here are analogies that people have proposed for what the human analogy to pre-training is. 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. The other is to think about evolution as doing some kind of search for 3 billion years, which then results in a human lifetime instance. I’m curious if you think either of these are analogous to pre-training. How would you think about what lifetime human learning is like, if not pre-training? I think there are some similarities between both of these and 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. Yes.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.