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Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

reuters.com

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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#101

Post by greenthrow »

sirspacey wrote: post #85

Lots of dismissive comments here. Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had. He’s raised enough to compete at the level of Grok, Claude, et al. He’s offering investors a pure play AGI investment, possibly one of the only organizations available to do so. Who else would you give $1B to pursue that? That’…

I have this rock here that might grant wishes. I will sell it to you for $10,000. Sure it might just be a rock, but if it grants wishes $10k is a very cheap price!

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#102

Post by Yizahi »

justinclift wrote: post #73
Yizahi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a situation with a sold out train to a popular destination, where people are already reselling their tickets for some crazy markup, and then suddenly railway decides to add one more train car and opens flash ticket sale. Investors feeling missing out on OpenAI and others are now hoping to catch this last train ticket to the AI.

Sounds like it's destined to be a looooong train with many carriages. ;)

The problem is a content to train LLMs (I assume that Ilia will continue this line or research). Big content holders are already raising moats and restricting access or partnering with a single existing LLM corporation. And also time, because all this involves a lot of hardware. Any subsequent competitor will have to scale higher and higher wall just to catch up (if the LLM progress doesn't stall and get into diminishing returns).

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#103

Post by torginus »

xianshou wrote: post #19

Same funding as OpenAI when they started, but SSI explicitly declared their intention not to release a single product until superintelligence is reached. Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era?

A non-cynical take is that Ilya wanted to do research without the pressure of having to release a marketable product and figuring out how to monetize their technology, which is why he left OpenAI.

A very cynical take is that this is an extreme version of 'we plan to spend all money on growth and figure out monetization later' model that many social media companies with a burn rate of billions of $$, but no business model, have used.

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#104

Post by sim7c00 »

highfrequency wrote: post #42

“…a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market," Gross said in an interview.” A couple years ??

well since it's no longer ok to just suck up anyone's data and train your AI, it will be a new challenge for them to avoid that pitfall. I can imagine it will take some time...

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#106

Post by CuriouslyC »

DalasNoin wrote: post #60
danielovichdk wrote: post #44

"It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel." Why Tel Aviv in Israel ?

Ilya went to university in israel and all founders are jewish. Many labs have offices outside of the US, like london, due to crazy immigration law in the us.

There are actually a ton of reasons to like London. The engineering talent is close to bay level for fintech/security systems engineers while being 60% of the price, it has 186% deductions with cash back instead of carry forward for R&D spending, it has the best AI researchers in the world and profit from patents is only taxed at 10% in the UK.

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#107

Post by jchonphoenix »

xianshou wrote: post #19

Same funding as OpenAI when they started, but SSI explicitly declared their intention not to release a single product until superintelligence is reached. Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era?

OpenAI initially raised 50m in their institutional round.

1b was a non profit donation, so there wasn't an expectation of returns on that one.

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#108

Post by greenthrow »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29
DelTaco wrote: post #3

This has to be one of the quickest valuations past a billion. I wonder if they can even effectively make use of the funds in a reasonable enough timeline.

> I wonder if they can even effectively make use of the funds in a reasonable enough timeline. I read that it cost Google ~$190 million to train Gemini, not even including staff salaries. So feels like a billion gives you about 3 "from scratch" comparable training runs.

Your estimate seems way off given Google already had their own compute hardware and staff. And if this company is going straight for AGI there's no way $1 billion is enough.

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#109

Post by dartos »

sirspacey wrote: post #85

Lots of dismissive comments here. Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had. He’s raised enough to compete at the level of Grok, Claude, et al. He’s offering investors a pure play AGI investment, possibly one of the only organizations available to do so. Who else would you give $1B to pursue that? That’…

All I’m saying is you used the word “if” a lot there.

AGI assumes exponential, preferably infinite and continuous improvement, something unseen before in business or nature.

Neither siri nor Alexa were sold as AGI and neither alone come close to a $1B product. gpt and other LLMs has quickly become a commodity, with AI companies racing to the bottom for inference costs.

I don’t really see the plan, product wise.

Moreover you say: > Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had.

Which is absolutely true, but that doesn’t imply more breakthroughs are just around the corner, nor does the current technology suggest AGI is coming.

VCs are willing to take a $1B bet on exponential growth with a 500B upside.

Us regular folk see that and are dumbfounded because AI is obviously not going to improve exponentially forever (literally nothing in the observed universe does) and you can already see the logarithmic improvement curve. That’s where the dismissive attitude comes from.

Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

#110

Post by bdcravens »

greenthrow wrote: post #101
sirspacey wrote: post #85

Lots of dismissive comments here. Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had. He’s raised enough to compete at the level of Grok, Claude, et al. He’s offering investors a pure play AGI investment, possibly one of the only organizations available to do so. Who else would you give $1B to pursue that? That’…

I have this rock here that might grant wishes. I will sell it to you for $10,000. Sure it might just be a rock, but if it grants wishes $10k is a very cheap price!

Except in this analogy you've already had success mining rocks that create supernatural results.
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