OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever spoke on a range of topics at NeurIPS, the annual AI conference, Friday afternoon before accepting an award for his contributions to the field.
Sutskever gave his predictions for “superintelligent” AI, AI more capable than humans at many tasks, which he believes will be achieved at some point. Superintelligent AI will be “different, qualitatively” from the AI we have today, Sutskever said — and in some aspects unrecognizable.
“[Superintelligent] systems are actually going to be agentic in a real way,” Suktsever said, as opposed to the current crop of “very slightly agentic” AI. They’ll “reason,” and, as a result, become more unpredictable. They’ll understand things from limited data. And they’ll be self-aware, Sutskever believes.
They may want rights, in fact. “It’s not a bad end result if you have AIs and all they want is to co-exist with us and just to have rights,” Sutskever said.
After leaving OpenAI, Sutskever founded a lab, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), focused on general AI safety. SSI raised $1 billion in September.
