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Comment by Ilya Sutskever

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AI researcher, co-founder and former former chief scientist at OpenAI
I'd like to take a small detour and to give an analogy that will hopefully clarify why more accurate prediction of the next word leads to more understanding, real understanding. Let's consider an example. Say you read a detective novel, [...] then let's say that at the last page of the book, the detective has gathered all the clues, gathered all the people, and saying, "Okay, I'm going to reveal the identity of whoever committed the crime, and that person's name is.." Predict that word.
AI Verified source (Mar 22, 2023)
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Policy proposals and claims
AIs understand
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Statement relation comments

AI Verified The quote supports the idea that next-word-predicting systems can achieve "real understanding" ("more accurate prediction of the next word leads to more understanding, real understanding"), which clearly implies support for the claim that AIs such as language models understand. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2h ago
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AI Verified The quote explicitly says that better next-word prediction leads to "more understanding, real understanding." Since next-word prediction is the ability associated with language-model AIs, the ordinary implication is that such AIs do understand, though the quote argues this by analogy rather than naming AI directly. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2h ago

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Quote authenticity comments

AI Verified NVIDIA’s indexed transcript for the exact session URL contains the passage at about 28:04–28:45, including “I’d like to take a small detour …” and “Say you read a detective novel … Predict that word,” and the surrounding turns show it is Ilya Sutskever answering Jensen Huang. The session page names both speakers, and official NVIDIA pages place this fireside chat on March 22, 2023, so the stored author, source URL, and date are consistent. ([nvidia.com](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring23-s52092/?utm_source=openai)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2h ago
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