Ilya Sutskever Quotes

the dinners with Musk and Altman was a research engineer at Google, Ilya Sutskever. They were able to lure him away, with a $1.9 million salary and starting bonus, to be the chief scientist of the new lab. Page was furious.

It’s easy for you to tell what it’s a photo of, but to program a function that inputs nothing but the colors of all the pixels of an image and outputs an accurate caption such as “A group of young people playing a game of frisbee” had eluded all the world’s AI researchers for decades. Yet a team at Google led by Ilya Sutskever did precisely that in 2014. Input a different set of pixel colors, and it replies “A herd of elephants walking across a dry grass field,” again correctly. How did they do it? Deep Blue–style, by programming handcrafted algorithms for detecting frisbees, faces and the like? No, by creating a relatively simple neural network with no knowledge whatsoever about the physical world or its contents, and then letting it learn by exposing it to massive amounts of data. AI visionary Jeff Hawkins wrote in 2004 that “no computer can…see as well as a mouse,” but those days are now long gone.

Since humans can solve perception problems very quickly, despite our neurons being relatively slow, moderately deep and large neural networks have enabled machines to succeed in a similar fashion. (Ilya Sutskever)

How do you even think about unsupervised learning? How do you benefit from it? Once our understanding improves and unsupervised learning advances, this is where we will acquire new ideas, and see a completely unimaginable explosion of new applications. (Ilya Sutskever)

But I can’t even articulate what it is we want from unsupervised learning. You want something; you want the model to understand...whatever that means. (Ilya Sutskever)

There is a compelling argument that large, deep neural networks should be able to represent very good solutions to perception problems. It goes like this: human neurons are slow, and yet humans can solve perception problems extremely quickly and accurately. If humans can solve useful problems in a fraction of a second, then you should only need a very small number of massively-parallel steps in order to solve problems like vision and speech recognition. (Ilya Sutskever)