Ilya's name might be the reason they got into the conversation about the money at the first place, but given that AI is very capital intensive business, $1B is not an insane amount imho. It will give him and the team a decent amount of time to do the research they want to do, without having the pressure of customers and what not.
Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
181–190 of 803 posts
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#182Earlier 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]
The successful companies that came out of the dot com bubble era actually proved their business viability before getting major investment, though.
Amazon is one of the most famous successes of the era. Bezos quit his job, launched the business out of his garage, with seed money being $10K of his own savings, and was doing $20K/week in sales just 30 days later. And I believe their only VC round before going public was an $8 investment from Kleiner Perkins. But they were a company who proved their viability early on, had a real product with rapid revenue growth before getting any VC $$.
I’d say this SSI round is more similar to Webvan, who went public with a valuation of $4.8 billion, and at that time had done a grand total of $395K in sales, with losses over $50 million.
I’m sure there are good investments out there for AI companies that are doing R&D and advancing the state of the art. However, a $1 billion investment at a $5 billion valuation, for a company with zero product or revenue, just an idea, that’s nuts IMO, and extremely similar to the type of insanity we saw during the dot com bubble. Even more so given that SSI seemingly don’t even want to be a business - direct quote from Ilya:
> This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then … It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race.
This doesn’t sound to me like someone who wants to build a business, it sounds like someone who wants to hack on AI with no oversight or proof of financial viability. Kinda wild to give him $1 billion to do that IMO.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#183All 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...
If we were sure we could build superhuman intelligence, the valuation would've been a lot higher!
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#184>Safe Superintelligence (SSI), newly co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in cash to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities, company executives told Reuters.
>SSI says it plans to partner with cloud providers and chip companies to fund its computing power needs but hasn't yet decided which firms it will work with.
1bn in cash is crazy.... usually they get cloud compute credits (which they count as funding)
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#185Earlier 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...
Read up on astrocytes.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#186Same 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 m…
That’s not a cynical take, it’s the obvious take.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#187Lots 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’…
Even with Ilya demonstrating his capabilities in those areas you mentioned, it seems like investors are simply betting on his track record, hoping he’ll replicate the success of OpenAI. This doesn’t appear to be an investment in solving a specific problem with a clear product-market fit, which is why the reception feels dismissive.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If London has the best AI researchers in the world, why are all the top companies (minus Mistral) American?
Google Deepmind is based in London.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#189Earlier 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.
except in this case, the train driver from the original train was "sacked" (some believe unfairly), and decided to get their own train to drive. Of course, the smoothness of the ride depends on the driver of the train.
Even with the best train driver, the ride won't be any good of the track is shit and the rolling stock is falling apart.