Iliya Sootzgever: Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Open AI

Iliya Sootzgever is the co-founder and chief scientist of Open AI, a company that aims to build artificial general intelligence. He is known for his work on the large language model GPT-3 and its public-facing product, Chat GPT. Sootzgever's background includes a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto and a Master's and PhD in computer science. He has made significant contributions to the field of deep learning, including being the main impetus behind AlexNet, a convolutional neural network that set off the deep learning revolution. Sootzgever's work on Chat GPT has had a profound impact and its release in November 2022 generated excitement as well as societal concerns. He believes that the human brain serves as the best example of intelligence and has worked on developing large language models to mimic human understanding and prediction. Sootzgever acknowledges that current AI systems are still far from matching human capabilities, but the potential for AI to surpass human learning in the future is not inconceivable. He views consciousness as a matter of degree rather than a binary distinction and suggests that an experiment could be conducted to determine if an AI system can articulate awareness without being explicitly trained on consciousness. Open AI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, and they are open to exploring sensible government regulations to ensure responsible development and deployment of AI technologies. Sootzgever acknowledges the importance of technical progress in deep learning and expects the field to continue evolving. While there may be limitations to scaling large language models, he believes that progress will come from various dimensions of deep learning and that specialized training for specific domains will be beneficial once a robust understanding of tasks is achieved.