Today, I am going to introduce something interesting about AI based on a quote from former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
He once said:
Look. The models, they just want to learn. You have to understand this. The models, they just want to learn.
Ilya Sutskever (circa 2015, via Dario Amodei)
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic and known for creating Claude, heard this and had a moment of enlightenment.
This quote means that the models (AI) just want to learn, so all you have to do is get the obstacles out of their way and give them good data and enough space to operate in.
And this also implies that you should not do something stupid, like condition them badly numerically.
Ilya also said the following at another event.
What "Deep Learning" is, is the process of alchemy. We take the raw materials of data. Plus the energy source of compute and we get this, "Intelligence".
Ilya Sutslever
In essence, Ilya tells us that data and compute are all you need, and that anything else is not merely unnecessary but can actually be harmful, hindering the potential for AI capabilities where the sky is the limit.
This brings us to the problem called the "AI Black Box", but I firmly believe that in order to surpass human capability, this is both inevitable and crucial for success.