The rise of reasoning machines

Ilya Sutskever discussed the boundary between understanding and awareness, as what comes next, in his latest test of time talk at NeurIPS 2024. To understand is to predict things accurately. To be self-aware is to be able to predict accurately with an understanding of what it is and what its environment is.

This all goes back to Ilya’s provocation for why next-token prediction is enough on the Dwarkesh Podcast:

Predicting the next token well means that you understand the underlying reality that led to the creation of that token.