Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence

**Ilya Sutskever** (0:00)
But I would not underestimate the difficulty of alignment of models that are actually smarter than us, of models that are capable of misrepresenting their intentions.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:10)
Are you worried about spies?

**Ilya Sutskever** (0:11)
I'm really not worried about the way it's being leaked. We will all be able to become more enlightened because we interact with an AGI that will help us see the world more correctly. Like imagine talking to the best meditation teacher in history. Microsoft has been a very, very good partner for us. So I challenge the claim that Next Token Prediction cannot surpass human performance.
If your base neural net is smart enough, you just ask it like, what would a person with great insight and wisdom and capability do?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:43)
Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Ilya Sutskever, who is the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI. Ilya, welcome to The Lunar Society.

**Ilya Sutskever** (0:52)
Thank you, happy to be here.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:54)
First question, and no humility allowed.
There's many scientists, or maybe not that many scientists, who will make a big breakthrough in their field. There's far fewer scientists who will make multiple independent breakthroughs that define their field throughout their career. What is the difference? What distinguishes you from other researchers? Why have you been able to make multiple breakthroughs in your field?

**Ilya Sutskever** (1:13)
Well, thank you for the kind words.
It's hard to answer that question. I mean, I tried really hard. I gave it everything you got and that worked so far. I think that's all there is to it.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:30)
Got it.
What's the explanation for why there aren't more illicit uses of GPT? Why aren't more foreign governments using it to spread propaganda or scam grandmothers or something?

**Ilya Sutskever** (1:40)
I mean, maybe they haven't really gotten to do it a lot, but it also wouldn't surprise me if some of it was going on right now. Certainly, I imagine they'd be taking some of the open-source models and trying to use them for that purpose.
Like I sure I would expect this would be something that would be interested in the future.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:01)
It's like technically possible they just haven't thought about it enough?

**Ilya Sutskever** (2:04)
Or haven't like done it at scale using their technology, or maybe it's happening but they just don't know it.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:09)
Would you be able to track it if it was happening?

**Ilya Sutskever** (2:11)
I think large-scale tracking is possible, yes. I mean, it requires all special operation is possible.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:18)
Now, there's some window in which AI is very economically valuable on the scale of airplanes, let's say, but we haven't reached AGI yet. How big is that window?

**Ilya Sutskever** (2:28)
I mean, I think this window, it's hard to give you a precise answer, but it's definitely going to be like a good multi-year window. It's also a question of definition because AI before it becomes AGI is going to be increasingly more valuable year after year, I'd say in an exponential way. So in some sense, it may feel like, especially in hindsight, it may feel like there was only one year or two years because those two years were larger than the previous years. But I would say that already last year, there've been a fair amount of economic value produced by AI. Next year is going to be larger and larger after that. So I think that there's going to be a good multi-year chunk of time.
But that's going to be true, I would say, from now until AGI pretty much.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:19)
Well, because I'm curious if there's a startup that's using your models, right?
At some point, if you have AGI, there's only one business in the world, right? It's OpenAI. How much window do they have? Does any business have where they're actually producing something that AGI can't produce? Yeah.

**Ilya Sutskever** (3:33)
Well, I mean, it's the same question as asking how long until AGI. I think it's a hard question to answer. I mean, I hesitate to give you a number. Also because there is this thing where, effect where people who are optimistic people who are working on the technology tend to underestimate the time it takes to get there. But I think that the way I ground myself is by thinking about a self-driving car. In particular, there is an analogy where if you look at the Tesla, and if you look at the self-driving behavior of it, it looks like it does everything.
It does everything. But it's also clear that there is still a long way to go in terms of reliability. And we might be in a similar place with respect to our models where it also looks like we can do everything.