171–180 of 803 posts
“…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 ??
"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 ?
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 v…
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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.
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.
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> 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 transformer…
even if we bought this negative result as somehow “proving impossibility”, i’m not convinced plasticity is necessary for intelligence
huge respect for richard sutton though
$1B raise, $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple months old and doesn't have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild.
$1B raise, $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple months old and doesn't have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild.
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 suspect there's a big corporate market for LLMs with very predictable behaviour in terms of what the LLM knows from its training data, vs what it knows from RAG or its context window.
If you're making a chatbot for Hertz Car Hire, you want it to answer based on Hertz policy documents, even if the training data contained policy documents for Avis and Enterprise and Budget and Thrifty car hire.
Avoiding incorrect answers and hallucinations (when appropriate) is a type of AI safety.
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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…
I get the impression that they really do believe scale is all you need, other than perhaps some post-training changes to encourage longer horizon reasoning. Maybe Ilya is in this camp, although frankly it does seem a bit naive to discount all the architectural and operational shortcomings of pre-trained Transformers, or assume they can be mitigated by wrapping the base LLM in an agent that provides what's missing.