Live data from Hacker News

Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

reuters.com

151–160 of 803 posts

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

#151
All that money, we are not even sure we can build AGI. What is AGI. Clearly scaling LLMs won't cut it, but VCs keep funding people because they pretend they can build super intelligence. I don't see that happening in the next 5 years: https://medium.com/@fsndzomga/there-will-be-no-agi-d9be9af44...

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

#152
post #70
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is significant possibility that true AI (what Ilia calls superintelligence) is impossible to build using neural networks. So it is closer to some tokenbro project than to nuclear research. Or he will simply shift goalposts, and call some LLM superintelligent.

> There is significant possibility that true AI (what Ilia calls superintelligence) is impossible to build using neural networks What evidence can you provide to back up the statement of this "significant possibility"? Human brains use neural networks...

There was a very good paper in Nature showing this definitively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437933

Modern ANN architectures are not actually capable of long-term learning in the same way animals are, even stodgy old dogs that don't learn new tricks. ANNs are not a plausible model for the brain, even if they emulate certain parts of the brain (the cerebellum, but not the cortex)

I will add that transformers are not capable of recursion, so it's impossible for them to realistically emulate a pigeon's brain. (you would need millions of layers that "unlink chains of thought" purely by exhaustion)

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

#155

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’…

> If AGI works, in any capacity or at any level, it will have a lot of big customers.

This is wrong. The models may end up cheaply available or even free. The business cost will be in hosting and integration.

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

#156
post #134
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the AI bubble is very, very real. Not that LLMs are all hype, they’re certainly impressive with useful applications, but AI companies are getting insane valuations with zero proof that they’re viable businesses.

[deleted]

But... that's exactly right though? Also

>Agreed, the car bubble is very, very real. Not that the internal combustion carriage is all hype, it's certainly impressive with useful applications, but car manufacturers are getting insane valuations with zero proof they're viable businesses.

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

#157
Considering that Sam Bankman-Fried raised more money at higher multiplier for a company to trade magic tokens and grand ideas such as that maybe one day you will be able to buy a banana with them I don't think Ilya impressed the investors too much.

On a serious note I would love to bet on him at this valuation. I think many others would as well. I guess if he wanted more money he would easily get it but probably he values small circle of easy to live investors instead.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.co…

Which basic counting tests do they still fail? Recent examples I've seen fall well within the range of innumeracy that people routinely display. I feel like a lot of people are stuck in the mindset of 10 years ago, when transformers weren't even invented yet and state-of-the-art models couldn't identify a bird, no matter how much capabilities advance.

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

#159

Safe superintelligence is a misnomer. If it’s intelligent, it knows what must be done. If it can’t, it’s not super or intelligent.

I don't see how this argument makes any sense. Imagine that you have a sentient super intelligent computer, but it's completely airgapped and cut off from the rest of the world. As long as it stays that way it's both safe and super intelligent, no?

It's the old Ex Machina problem though. If the machine is more intelligent than you, any protections you design are likely to be insufficient to contain it. If it's completely incapable of communicating with the outside world then it's of no use. In Ex Machina that was simple - the AI didn't need to connect to the internet or anything like that, it just had to trick the humans into releasing it.

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

#160
post #88

"Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" [Sutskever] said. Any guesses?

The conventional teaching that I am aware of says that you can scale across three dimensions: data, compute, parameters. But Ilya's formulation suggests that there may be more dimensions along which scaling is possible.
Post reply on HN