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Ilya Sutskever says it might take years, but he believes AI will one day be able to accomplish everything humans can.
Sutskever, the cofounder and former chief scientist of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, spoke about the technology while giving a convocation speech at the University of Toronto, his alma mater, last week.
“The real challenge with AI is that it is really unprecedented and really extreme, and it’s going to be very different in the future compared to the way it is today,” he said.
Sutskever said that while AI is already better at some things than humans, “there are so many things it cannot do as well and it’s so deficient, so you can say it still needs to catch up on a lot of things.”
But, he said, he believes “AI will keep getting better and the day will come when AI will do all the things that we can do.”
“How can I be so sure of that?” he continued. “We have a brain, the brain is a biological computer, so why can’t a digital computer, a digital brain, do the same things? This is the one-sentence summary for why AI will be able to do all those things, because we have a brain and the brain is a biological computer.”
As is customary at convocation and commencement ceremonies, Sutskever also gave advice to the new graduates. He implored them to “accept reality as it is, try not to regret the past, and try to improve the situation.”
“It’s so easy to think, ‘Oh, some bad past decision or bad stroke of luck, something happened, something is unfair,'” he said. “It’s so easy to spend so much time thinking like this while it’s just so much better and more productive to say, ‘Okay, things are the way they are, what’s the next best step?'”
Sutskever hasn’t always taken his own advice on the matter, though. He’s said before that he regrets his involvement in the November 2023 ousting of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Sutskever was a member of the board, which fired Altman after saying it “no longer has confidence” in his ability to lead OpenAI and that he was “not consistently candid in his communications.”
A few days later, however, Sutskever expressed regret for his involvement in the ouster and was one of hundreds of OpenAI employees who signed an open letter threatening to quit unless Altman was reinstated as CEO.
“I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” Sutskever said in a post on X at the time. “I never intended to harm OpenAI.”
Altman was brought back as CEO the same month. Sutskever left OpenAI six months later and started a research lab focused on building “safe superintelligence.”
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