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

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/ilya-sutskever-we-re-moving-from-the-age-of-scaling-to-the-age-of-research
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/ilya-sutskever-we-re-moving-from-the-age-of-scaling-to-the-age-of-research.md
Podcast: [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast)
Published: 2025-11-25T17:04:02+00:00
Episode link: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutskever-2
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/179924094/8fff4c8da77eff5a44fad5d13ae599e2.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/dwarkesh-podcast/episodes/ilya-sutskever-we-re-moving-from-the-age-of-scaling-to-the-age-of-research
Duration seconds: 5763

## Resource

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/dwarkesh To 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…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/dwarkesh-podcast/episodes/ilya-sutskever-we-re-moving-from-the-age-of-scaling-to-the-age-of-research/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/ilya-sutskever-we-re-moving-from-the-age-of-scaling-to-the-age-of-research.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.