Somewhere Ray Kurzweil is smiling.
Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one had built a nuclear bomb before the Manhattan project either.
Theoretical foundation was slowly built over decades before it started though. And correct me if I'm wrong, but calculations that it was feasible were present before the start too. They had to calculate how to do it, what will be the processes, how to construct it and so on, but theoretically scientists knew that this amount of material can start such process. On the other hand not only there is no clear path to AI t…
The theoretical foundation of transformers is well understood; they're able to approximate a very wide family of functions, particularly with chain of thought ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 ). Training them on next-token-prediction is essentially training them to compress, and more optimal compression requires a more accurate model of the world, so they're being trained to model the world better and better. However you want to define intelligence, for practical purposes models with better and better models of the world are more and more useful.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#113Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ilya is going for AGI, which no one has come close to. So I'd say it holds.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because is Ilya. This deal was cooked way back, though, perhaps even before the coup. Now, can they make a product that makes at least $1B + 1 dollar in revenue? Doubt it, I honestly don't see a market for "AI safety/security".
I wonder if "Super Intelligence" means anything .. just LLMs, or maybe they are pursuing new architectures and shooting for AGI ?
In 2022 Ilya Sutskever claimed there wasn't a distinction:
> It may look—on the surface—that we are just learning statistical correlations in text. But it turns out that to ‘just learn’ the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text. This text is actually a projection of the world.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT9sP4mAWEg - sadly the only transcripts I could find were on AI grifter websites that shouldn't be linked to)
This is transparently false - newer LLMs appear to be great at arithmetic, but they still fail basic counting tests. Computers can memorize a bunch of symbolic times tables without the slightest bit of quantitative reasoning. Transformer networks are dramatically dumber than lizards, and multimodal LLMs based on transformers are not capable of understanding what numbers are. (And if Claude/GPT/Llama aren't capable of understanding the concept of "three," it is hard to believe they are capable of understanding anything.)
Sutskever is not actually as stupid as that quote suggests, and I am assuming he has since changed his mind.... but maybe not. For a long time I thought OpenAI was pathologically dishonest and didn't consider that in many cases they aren't "lying," they blinded by arrogance and high on their own marketing.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#116Safe superintelligence is a misnomer. If it’s intelligent, it knows what must be done. If it can’t, it’s not super or intelligent.
There's no reason it's intelligence should care about your goals though. the worry is creating a sociopathic (or weirder/worse) intelligence. Morality isn't derivable from first principles, it's a consequence of values.
Precisely. This is attempting to implement morality by constraining. Hence, it’s not morality.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#117"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.
Ilya also lived in Israel as a kid from age 5 to 15 so he speaks Hebrew. His family emigrated from Russia. Later they moved to Canada.
Source: Wikipedia.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#118Funny how the "Open" in OpenAI disappeared pretty quickly. I bet the "Safe" in "Safe Superintelligence" will follow a similar path
Along with Super in Superintelligence.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#119"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 ?
Why not? The Bay isn't the only place with talent. Many of the big tech powerhouse companies already have offices there. There's also many Israeli nationals working the US that may find moving back closer to family a massive advantage.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's a startup hub, there is great engineering talent there, and the cost of living is lower than the US.
Cost of living is extremely high in Tel Aviv, but the rest is true.
Israel is geographically pretty small though -- I'm guessing you could live an hour up or down the coast and have it be an outrageous commute for people accustomed to the Bay Area?