Ilya Sutskever



Ilya Sutskever (1985/86) is a Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist working in machine learning, who co-founded and serves as Chief Scientist of OpenAI. He has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. He is the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, a convolutional neural network.

Quotes

 * There was a period of time when we were starting OpenAI when I wasn’t exactly sure how the progress would continue. But I had one very explicit belief, which is: one doesn’t bet against deep learning. Somehow, every time you run into an obstacle, within six months or a year researchers find a way around it.


 * I’ve always been inspired and motivated by the idea. It wasn’t called AGI back then, but you know, like, having a neural network do everything. I didn’t always believe that they could. But it was the mountain to climb.


 * ... the safeguards he wants to design: a machine that looks upon people the way parents look on their children. “In my opinion, this is the gold standard,” he says. “It is a generally true statement that people really care about children.” (Does he have children? “No, but I want to,” he says.)


 * It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious.


 * I lead a very simple life. 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.


 * In a nutshell, I had the realization that if you train, a large neural network on a large and a deep neural network on a big enough dataset that specifies some complicated task that people do, such as vision, then you will succeed necessarily. And the logic for it was irreducible; we know that the human brain can solve these tasks and can solve them quickly. And the human brain is just a neural network with slow neurons. So, then we just need to take a smaller but related neural network and train it on the data. And the best neural network inside the computer will be related to the neural network that we have in our brains that performs this task.


 * The thing you really want is for the human teachers that teach the AI to collaborate with an AI. You might want to think of it as being in a world where the human teachers do 1% of the work and the AI does 99% of the work. You don't want it to be 100% AI. But you do want it to be a human-machine collaboration, which teaches the next machine.