OpenAI Co-Founder Sutskever Joins the Skeptics

As Sri and I head to San Diego for the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference this week (get in touch if you’ll also be there!), we’re excited to learn more about reinforcement learning, the model training technique du jour at all the major AI developers.

There’s rising skepticism among researchers, including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, about the effectiveness of RL and whether it can advance AI to the level of artificial general intelligence, on par with human experts in scientific research, healthcare and other domains.

Sutskever, who left OpenAI last year to start his own AI lab, explained in a rare interview on the Dwarkesh podcast why AI models are struggling to handle real-world tasks that aren’t part of the evaluations that researchers use when they develop the models.

He said researchers use RL to help the models ace the evaluations, but that doesn’t improve the way the models generalize, or handle a wide variety of tasks. (We covered this topic last week in the context of OpenAI versus Google.)