The Meeting With Ilya Sutskever - The Story of OpenAI's Epic Rise

Saturday - October 28 2023, 11:20 UTC - 1 year ago

Ilya Sutskever is the head of OpenAI's cofounder and chief scientist and has a big hand in bringing about the world-tilting technology the company produces. He is now more focused on how to stop an artificial superintelligence from going rogue. With the publication of the surprise hit ChatGPT last November, there has been an enormous buzz about OpenAI.

Ilya Sutskever, head bowed, is deep in thought. His arms are spread wide and his fingers are splayed on the tabletop like a concert pianist about to play his first notes. We sit in silence.

I’ve come to meet Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, in his company’s unmarked office building on an unremarkable street in the Mission District of San Francisco to hear what’s next for the world-tilting technology he has had a big hand in bringing about. I also want to know what’s next for him—in particular, why building the next generation of his company’s flagship generative models is no longer the focus of his work.

Instead of building the next GPT or image maker DALL-E, Sutskever tells me his new priority is to figure out how to stop an artificial superintelligence (a hypothetical future technology he sees coming with the foresight of a true believer) from going rogue.

Sutskever tells me a lot of other things too. He thinks ChatGPT just might be conscious (if you squint). He thinks the world needs to wake up to the true power of the technology his company and others are racing to create. And he thinks some humans will one day choose to merge with machines.A lot of what Sutskever says is wild. But not nearly as wild as it would have sounded just one or two years ago. As he tells me himself, ChatGPT has already rewritten a lot of people’s expectations about what’s coming, turning "will never happen" into "will happen faster than you think." .

"It’s important to talk about where it’s all headed," he says, before predicting the development of artificial general intelligence (by which he means machines as smart as humans) as if it were as sure a bet as another iPhone: "At some point we really will have AGI. Maybe OpenAI will build it. Maybe some other company will build it." .

Since the release of its sudden surprise hit, ChatGPT, last November, the buzz around OpenAI has been astonishing, even in an industry known for hype. No one can get enough of this nerdy $80 billion startup. World leaders seek (and get) private audiences. Its clunky product names pop up in casual conversation.

OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, spent a good part of the summer on a weeks-long outreach tour, glad-handing politicians and speaking to packed auditoriums around the world. But Sutskever is much less of a public figure, and he doesn’t give a lot of interviews.

He is deliberate and methodical when he talks. There are long pauses when he thinks about what he wants to say and how to say it, turning questions over like puzzles he needs to solve. He does not seem interested in talking about himself. "I lead a very simple life," he says. "I go to work; then I go home. I don’t do much else. There are a lot of social activities one could engage in, lots of events one could go to. Which I don’t." .

But when we talk about AI, and the epochal risks and rewards he sees down the line, vistas open up: "It’s going to be monumental, earth-shattering. There will be a before and an after." .

Better and better and better .

Hinton would later share the Turing Award with Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio for their work on neural networks. But when Sutskever join their lab in 2007, the subject was still fairly nascent. Three years later, along with his Ph.D. adviser, Sutskever went public with a paper called "On the Benefits of Modeling High-Level Semantics with Neural Machines." .