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Ilya Sutskever quote, Nov 25, 2025

Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence · Nov 25, 2025 · Interview, Dwarkesh Podcast: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

If you think about the term “AGI”, especially in the context of pre-training, you will realize that a human being is not an AGI.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Ilya Sutskever

Quote
All the pre-trained models are pretty much the same because they pre-train on the same data.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
But now that compute is big, compute is now very big, in some sense we are back to the age of research.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
I think that’s been guiding me a fair bit, thinking from multiple angles and looking for almost beauty, beauty and simplicity.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
Number three, I think it would be really materially helpful if the power of the most powerful superintelligence was somehow capped because it would address a lot of these concerns.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
One consequence of the age of scaling is that scaling sucked out all the air in the room. Because scaling sucked out all the air in the room, everyone started to do the same thing.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
So for research, you definitely need some amount of compute, but it’s far from obvious that you need the absolutely largest amount of compute ever for research.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
So it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers.Nov 25, 2025· Interview
The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people.Nov 25, 2025· Interview

On the same topics

Quote
And actually the models today are far beyond what was possible even six months ago.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
It’s time to plan for this, because AI systems are likely to get better a lot faster than people expect, and as they become more advanced we should expect profound changes to happen to people and to society.Jack ClarkMay 26, 2026· Keynote
When I look at the graph, I feel a sense of vertigo, because I know a little bit about what underlies this graph.Jack ClarkMay 26, 2026· Keynote
My personal takeaway from the last several years, and take on why there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field, comes down to this: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.”Sam AltmanApr 10, 2026· Post
The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring.Sam AltmanApr 10, 2026· Post
And at this point we have line of sight to much better models that are coming this year, and the amount of pain within OpenAI that we’ve had to decide how to allocate compute goes up, not down, over time.Greg BrockmanApr 7, 2026· Interview
About this quote
Said by
Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence
Where
Dwarkesh Podcast: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
Topics
AGI
Company
Safe Superintelligence
Source
dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutskever-2

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