“Highlights from Ilya Sutskever’s November 2025 interview with Dwarkesh Patel” by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸

Background Ilya Sutskever is a renowned machine learning researcher who co-authored the AlexNet paper in 2012 that helped kick off the deep learning revolution. Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and served as Chief Scientist until 2024. Sutskever participated in the temporary ouster of CEO Sam Altman and subsequently left the company. He founded his own company, Safe Superintelligence, which has raised $3 billion, but about which little else is known. Sutskever's second-ever interview with Dwarkesh Patel was released today, November 25, 2025. Here are the highlights from my point of view, along with my commentary. Research vs. scaling Sutskever says that (plus or minus a few years) 2012 to 2020 was an age of research, 2020 to 2025 was an age of scaling, and 2026 onward will be another age of research. This reiterates previous comments he's made. Sutskever specifically predicts that another 100x scaling of AI models would make a difference, but would not transform AI capabilities. Self-supervised pre-training vs. reinforcement learning-based training for LLMs Sutskever says “based on what people say on Twitter” — which is a vague, sketchy source — companies “spend more compute on RL than on pre-training at this point, because RL can actually consume quite [...] ---Outline:(00:16) Background(00:59) Research vs. scaling(01:28) Self-supervised pre-training vs. reinforcement learning-based training for LLMs(02:42) Confusion about LLMs' lack of economic impact(03:41) A lot of seat-of-the-pants speculation about the nature of intelligence(05:51) The role of emotion in cognition(08:45) Conclusion --- First published: November 25th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iuKa2iPg7vD9BdZna/highlights-from-ilya-sutskever-s-november-2025-interview --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.