Ilya Sutskever - Opening Remarks: Confronting the Possibility of AGI

Ilya Sutskever introduces a workshop aimed at exposing mainstream machine learning researchers to AI alignment ideas, motivated by the rapid progress towards AGI. He discusses the historical disconnect between the AI alignment field, originating from sci-fi and focused on the implications of superintelligence, and the machine learning field, which was traumatized by the AI Winter and initially pessimistic about achieving AGI. Sutskever argues that while supervised learning presents fewer alignment challenges, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning introduce complexities due to the difficulty in understanding what the AI is learning and the potential for unexpected creativity. He emphasizes the importance of addressing alignment challenges, especially as AI systems become capable of outputting complex code and making decisions in real-world scenarios, to ensure that AI behavior is aligned with human intentions.