Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
In this Dwarkesh Patel interview, Ilya Sutskever reflects on AI’s current phase, arguing that the field is moving from scaling toward research. The excerpt centers on the disconnect between impressive benchmark results and weaker economic or practical impact, along with possible explanations rooted in RL training, environment selection, and generalization limits. The conversation also uses human analogies to compare pretraining and reinforcement learning, including competitive programming and the role of emotions as a value-function-like signal.