Ilya Sutskever, U of T honorary degree recipient, June 6, 2025

• Thank you to everyone for the honorary degree.
• It's meaningful to return to the University of Toronto.
• Embrace reality and focus on the present.
• AI is transforming the world in unprecedented ways.
• We must engage with AI to understand and adapt to future challenges.

Okay. Hi, everyone. It's really nice to be here. I want to thank everyone for setting this up, for organizing this, for giving me the honorary degree.

It's actually extremely meaningful to receive the honorary degree almost to this day. Twenty years ago, I received my bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto in this exact hall.

And actually, at this point now I have. This would be my fourth degree from the University of Toronto.

And I had a really, extremely wonderful time here. I spent a total of 10 years. I did my undergrad degree, and I learned a lot.

And I've also been a graduate student here, and it was really wonderful. I was able to go deep in my... whatever I was interested in and to really become a researcher.

It was really wonderful to study with Jeff Hinton. Actually, the fact that Jeff Hinton was in this university was one of my life's great strokes of luck.

And I feel a lot of gratitude to the university. I feel like I couldn't have asked for a better way to, you know, become educated, mature, become a scientist.

Also, the University of Toronto, when I was a student here, we were doing the best AI research out of anywhere. It was the most revolutionary ideas, the most exciting work, and I feel very lucky that I was able to contribute to it already in grad school as a student.

But that was a long time ago. And the way I understand it, in a convocation speech, one is supposed to provide sagacious advice, and I'll do a little bit of that, but only a bit, because this one, this speech will be a little bit different.

You know, I will offer one bit of a useful state of mind, which, if one adopts it, makes everything much easier, which is to accept reality as it is and to try not to regret the past and try to improve the situation.

And the reason I say it is because it's so hard to adopt it. It's so easy to think, “Oh, like some bad past decision or bad stroke of luck, something happened, something is unfair.”

And you can just spend... it's so easy to spend so much time thinking like this, while it's just so much better and more productive to say, “Okay, things are the way they are. What's the next best step?”

And I find that whenever I do this myself, everything works out so much better.

But it's hard. It's hard. It's a constant struggle with one's emotion, and that's why I mention it to you.

Perhaps some of you will adopt it yourself. This is a reminder to adopt this mindset as best as one can, and also a reminder for myself: constant struggle.

But this aside, the reason it's not going to be the most conventional convocation speech is because there is something a little different going on right now. You all live, we all live in the most unusual time ever.

And this is something that people might say often, but I think it's actually true this time. And the reason it's true this time is because of AI. Right? Obviously.

I mean, from what I hear, the AI of today has already changed what it means to be a student by a pretty considerable degree, especially.

That's what I sense, and I think it's true. But of course, the impact of AI goes beyond that.

What happens to the kind of work we do? Well, it's starting to change a little bit in some unknown and unpredictable ways.

And some work may feel it sooner, some work may feel it later. With today's AI, you can go on Twitter and you can look at what AI can do and what people say, and you might feel a little bit of that.

You wonder, “Hey, which skills are useful, which ones will be less useful?” So you got these questions going on, and so you can say that the current level of challenge is how will it affect work and our careers?

But the thing, the real challenge with AI is that it's really unprecedented and really extreme and it's going to be very different in the future compared to the way it is today.

Like, you know, we've all seen AI, we've all spoken to a computer and a computer spoken back to us, which is a new thing.

Computers would not do this in the past, but now they do. So you speak to a computer and it understands you and it speaks back to you, and it also does it in voice and it writes some code. It's pretty crazy.

But there are so many things it cannot do as well. And it's so deficient. So you can say it still needs to catch up on a lot of things, but it's evocative, it's good enough that you can ask yourself.

You could imagine, “Okay, fine, in some number of years.” Some people say it's in 3, some people say it's in 5, 10. Numbers are being thrown around.

It's a bit hard to predict the future, but slowly but surely, or maybe not so slowly, I will keep getting better and the day will come when I will do all of all the things that we can do, not just some of them, but all of them.

Anything which I can learn, anything which any one of you can learn, the AI could do as well.

How do we know this, by the way? How can I be so sure? How can I be so sure of that?

The reason is that all of us have a brain and the brain is a biological computer. That's why we have a brain.

The brain is a biological computer. So why can't a digital computer, a digital brain do the same things? This is the one sentence summary for why AI will be able to do all those things because we have a brain and the brain is a biological computer.

And so you can start asking yourselves what's going to happen? What's going to happen when computers can do all of our jobs, right? Those are really big questions. Those are dramatic questions.

And right now you start thinking about it a little bit, you go, “Gosh, that's a little intense.” But it's actually only part of the intensity because what's gonna happen?

What will the collective want to use these AIs for? Do more work, grow the economy, do R&D, do AI research.

So then the rate of progress will become really extremely fast for some time at least. These are such extreme things. These are such unimaginable things.

So right now I'm trying to pull you into that a little bit, into this headspace of this really extreme and radical future that AI creates.

But it's also very difficult to imagine. It's very, very difficult to imagine. It's very difficult to internalize and to really believe on an emotional level.

Even I struggle with it. And yet the logic seems to dictate that this very likely should happen.

So what does one do in such a world? You know, there is a quote which goes like this: It says, “You may not take interest in politics, but politics will take interest in you.”

So the same applies to AI many times over. And in particular, I think that by simply using AI and looking at what the best AI of today can do, you get an intuition.

You get an intuition. And as AI continues to improve in one year, in two years and three years, the intuition will become stronger.

And a lot of the things that we are talking about now, they will become much more real. They'll become less imaginary.

In the end of the day, no amount of essays and explanations can compete with what we see with our own senses, with our own two eyes, and especially with AI, the very smart, super intelligent AI in the future.

There will be very profound issues about making sure that they say what they say and not pretend to be something else.

And I'm really condensing a lot into a small amount of information here, in time here.

But overall, by simply looking at what AI can do, not ignoring it. When the time comes, that will generate the energy that's required to overcome the huge challenge that AI will pose.

And the challenge that AI poses, in some sense, is the greatest challenge of humanity ever. And overcoming it will also bring the greatest reward.

And in some sense, whether you like it or not, your life is going to be affected by AI to a great extent.

And so looking at it, paying attention, and then generating the energy to solve the problems that will come up, that's going to be the main thing.

And I'll stop here. Thank you so much. Thank you.