AI with Reasoning Power Will Be Less Predictable, Ilya Sutskever Says

 AI scientist Ilya Sutskever speaks at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada December 13, 2024. (Reuters)
AI scientist Ilya Sutskever speaks at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada December 13, 2024. (Reuters)
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AI with Reasoning Power Will Be Less Predictable, Ilya Sutskever Says

 AI scientist Ilya Sutskever speaks at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada December 13, 2024. (Reuters)
AI scientist Ilya Sutskever speaks at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada December 13, 2024. (Reuters)

Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, one of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, had a prediction to make on Friday: reasoning capabilities will make technology far less predictable.

Accepting a "Test of Time" award for his 2014 paper with Google's Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, Sutskever said a major change was on AI's horizon.

An idea that his team had explored a decade ago, that scaling up data to "pre-train" AI systems would send them to new heights, was starting to reach its limits, he said. More data and computing power had resulted in ChatGPT that OpenAI launched in 2022, to the world's acclaim.

"But pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end," Sutskever declared before thousands of attendees at the NeurIPS conference in Vancouver. "While compute is growing," he said, "the data is not growing, because we have but one internet."

Sutskever offered some ways to push the frontier despite this conundrum. He said technology itself could generate new data, or AI models could evaluate multiple answers before settling on the best response for a user, to improve accuracy. Other scientists have set sights on real-world data.

But his talk culminated in a prediction for a future of superintelligent machines that he said "obviously" await a point with which some disagree. Sutskever this year co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc in the aftermath of his role in Sam Altman's short-lived ouster from OpenAI, which he said within days he regretted.

Long-in-the-works AI agents, he said, will come to fruition in that future age, have deeper understanding and be self-aware. He said AI will reason through problems like humans can.

There's a catch.

"The more it reasons, the more unpredictable it becomes," he said.

Reasoning through millions of options could make any outcome non-obvious. By way of example, AlphaGo, a system built by Alphabet's DeepMind, surprised experts of the highly complex board game with its inscrutable 37th move, on a path to defeating Lee Sedol in a match in 2016.

Sutskever said similarly, "the chess AIs, the really good ones, are unpredictable to the best human chess players."

AI as we know it, he said, will be "radically different."



Alibaba Launches Open-Source AI Coding Model, Touted as Its Most Advanced to Date 

A man walks past the Alibaba logo displayed at its booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing, China July 16, 2025. (Reuters)
A man walks past the Alibaba logo displayed at its booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing, China July 16, 2025. (Reuters)
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Alibaba Launches Open-Source AI Coding Model, Touted as Its Most Advanced to Date 

A man walks past the Alibaba logo displayed at its booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing, China July 16, 2025. (Reuters)
A man walks past the Alibaba logo displayed at its booth during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing, China July 16, 2025. (Reuters)

Alibaba Group announced on Wednesday the launch of Qwen3-Coder, an open-source artificial intelligence model for software development that the Chinese e-commerce giant described as its most advanced coding tool to date.

The launch comes amid intensifying competition among Chinese technology companies in the global AI development race, with firms on both sides of the Pacific releasing increasingly sophisticated models. Qwen3-Coder is designed for software development tasks such as code generation and managing complex coding workflows, Alibaba said in a statement.

The company positioned the model as particularly strong in "agentic AI coding tasks" - automated processes where AI systems can work independently on programming challenges.

According to performance data released by Alibaba, Qwen3-Coder outperformed domestic competitors, including models from DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's K2 in key coding capabilities.

The company also claimed its model matched the performance of leading US models, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4 in certain areas.