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Ilya Sutskever: belief

25 Nov 2025 Dwarkesh Podcast Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

“What’s the good world? It’s where we have these powerful human-like learners that are also… By the way, maybe there’s another thing we haven’t discussed on the spec of the superintelligent AI that I think is worth considering.”

— Ilya Sutskever

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

…By default, you would expect the company that has that model to be getting all these gains because they have the model that has the skills and knowledge that it’s building up in the world. What is the reason to think that the benefits of that would be widely distributed and not just end up at whatever model company gets this continuous learning loop going first? Here is what I think is going to happen. Number one, let’s look at how things have gone so far with the AIs of the past. One company produced an advance and the other company scrambled and produced some similar things after some amount of time and they started to compete in the market and push the prices down. So I think from the market perspective, something similar will happen there as well. We are talking about the good world, by the way. What’s the good world? It’s where we have these powerful human-like learners that are also… By the way, maybe there’s another thing we haven’t discussed on the spec of the superintelligent AI that I think is worth considering. It’s that you make it narrow, it can be useful and narrow at the same time. You can have lots of narrow superintelligent AIs. But suppose you have many of them and you have some company that’s producing a lot of profits from it. Then you have another company that comes in and starts to compete. The way the competition is going to work is through specialization. Competition loves specialization. You see it in the market, you see it in evolution as well. You’re going to have lots of different niches and you’re going to have lots of different companies who are occupying different niches. In this world we might say one AI company is really quite a bit better at some area of really complicated economic activity and a different company is better at another area. And the third company is really good at litigation. Isn’t this contradicted by what human-like learning implies? It’s that it can learn……

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