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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

#231

Post by nilkn »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #200

Lots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in…

The argument about AGI from LLMs is not based on the current state of LLMs, but on the rate of progress over the last 5+ years or so. It wasn't very long ago that almost nobody outside of a few niche circles seriously thought LLMs could do what they do right now.

That said, my personal hypothesis is that AGI will emerge from video generation models rather than text generation models. A model that takes an arbitrary real-time video input feed and must predict the next, say, 60 seconds of video would have to have a deep understanding of the universe, humanity, language, culture, physics, humor, laughter, problem solving, etc. This pushes the fidelity of both input and output far beyond anything that can be expressed in text, but also creates extraordinarily high computational barriers.

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

#233

Post by WithinReason »

aithrowaway1987 wrote: post #216
WithinReason wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> newer LLMs appear to be great at arithmetic, but they still fail basic counting tests How does the performance of today's LLMs contradict Ilya's statement?

Because they can learn a bunch of symbolic formal arithmetic without learning anything about quantity. They can learn 5 x 3 = 15 without learning ***** **** ******* ***** = ***** = ******* ***** ****** * And this generalizes to almost every sentence an LLM can regurgitate.

The latter can be learned from "statistical correlations in text", just like Ilya said.

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

#234

Post by mgfist »

EGreg wrote: post #66
theptip wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talent attracts capital. Ilya is a legendary visionary, with a proven track record of turning billions into hundreds of billions. Of course he can raise unlimited money.

There is so much talent in the world that didn’t join PayPal and get silicon valley investors and go on to make billions of dollars and found other companies. The PayPal mafia includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, etc. They now parlayed that capital into more platforms and can easily arrange investments. Heck Peter Thiel even works with governments (Palantir) and got J D Vance on Trump’s ticket, while Elon might be in his…

I never understood this line of reasoning, because it presumes that everyone should have access to the same opportunities. It's clearly silly once you throw a few counter examples: should a Private in the military be able to skip the ranks and be promoted straight to General? Should a new grad software dev be able to be promoted to lead engineer without getting any experience?

Clearly there are reasons why opportunities are gated.

> This idea that you can just get huge audiences and investments due to raw talent, keeps a lot of people coming to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to “make it” and living on ramen. But even just coming there proves the point — a talented rando elsewhere in the world wouldn’t even have access to the capital and big boys networks.

All those people start somewhere though. Excluding nepotism, which is tangential point, all those people started somewhere and then grew through execution and further opening of opportunity. But it's not like they all got to where they are in one-shot. Taking your Ashton Kutcher example - yes he had a head start on twitter followers, but that's because he executed for years before on his career. Why would it make sense for some rando to rack up a million followers before he did?

Talent will earn you opportunities, but it's not going to open the highest door until you've put in the time and work.

Of course, it's not to say inequity or unequal access to opportunities doesn't exist in the world. Of course it does. But even in an ideal, perfectly equitable world, not everyone would have the same access to opportunities.

So yes, it makes perfect sense that someone would give Ilya $1B instead of some smart 18 year old, even if that 18 year old was Ilya from the past.

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

#236

Post by wubrr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #200

Lots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in…

> the more that it becomes clear that LLMs really are just "fancy autocomplete", even if it's really really fancy autocomplete

I also don't really see AGI emerging from LLMs any time soon, but it could be argued that human intelligence is also just 'fancy autocomplete'.

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

#237

Post by ctoth »

teqsun wrote: post #218

We don't even understand how the brain functions completely, not even close. Until we have a complete understanding of how our own GI works down to the exact bio-mechanical level, we can't achieve AGI. That's the theoretical basis and path for achieving AGI (if it's even possible). I'm tired of all the "we stick enough data in the magic black box blender and ta-da! AGI!" Every giant technological break-through throug…

Wait until you learn about Anesthesia!

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

#239

Post by TrackerFF »

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?

To my ears, it's more like a ambitious pharma project.

There's plenty of players going for the same goal. R&D is wildly expensive. No guarantee they'll reach the goal, first or even at all.

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

#240

Post by throwaway48476 »

mi_lk wrote: post #227
throwaway48476 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is selling shovels but no one is building mines.

In realistic terms, seems only nvda is selling AI shovels

The base LLM models that cost millions to train are also shovels.
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