VANCOUVER, Dec 13 (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."