Ilya Sutskever Declares the Scaling Era Dead. His $3 Billion Bet Says Research Will Win.
Ilya Sutskever helped prove that scale works in AI. Now he says it doesn't—and his $3 billion company is betting the future belongs to researchers with ideas, not labs with the biggest GPU clusters. The industry isn't ready for this argument. Ilya Sutskever thinks everyone is doing AI wrong. Not just slightly wrong. Fundamentally, paradigmatically wrong. In a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and former OpenAI chief scientist laid out a thesis that should unsettle every frontier lab executive currently signing billion-dollar compute contracts. The age of scaling, he argues, has ended. What comes next requires something the industry has largely abandoned: actual research. "We got to the point where we are in a world where there are more companies than ideas," Sutskever observed. "By quite a bit." The statement lands differently coming from him. This is the researcher who co-authored AlexNet, helped b...