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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

#291
> Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he "identified a mountain that's a bit different from what I was working on."

I guess the "mountain" is the key. "Safe" alone is far from being a product. As for the current LLM, Id even question how valuable "safe" can be.

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

#292
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two possibilities. 1. Either you are correct and the neural networks humans have are exactly the same or very similar to the programs in the LLMs. Then it will be relatively easy to verify this - just scale one LLN to the human brain neuron count and supposedly it will acquire consciousness and start rapidly learning and creating on its own without prompts. 2. Or what we call neural networks in the computer…

I agree with your stance - that being said there aren’t two options, one being identical or radically different. It’s not even a gradient between two choices, because there are several dimensions involved and nobody even knows what Superintelligence is anyways. If you wanted to reduce it down, I would say there are two possibilities: 1. Our understanding of Neurel Nets is currently sufficient to recreate intelligence…

There are layers of abstraction on top of “the math”. The back propagation math for a transformer is no different than for a multi-layer perception, yet a transformer is vastly more capable than a MLP. More to the point, it took a series of non-trivial steps to arrive at the transformer architecture. In other words, understanding the lowest-level math is no guarantee that you understand the whole thing, otherwise the transformer architecture would have been obvious.

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

#293

“…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 ??

What do you expect? This seems like a hard problem to solve. Hard problems take time.

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

#294
post #280
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.

The fact that the world hasn't ended and no nuke has been launched since the 1940s shows that the system is working. Give the button to a random billionaire and half of us will be dead by next week to improve profit margins.

Bikini atoll and the islanders that no longer live there due to nuclear contamination would like a word with you. Split hairs however you like with the definition of "launch" but those tests went on well through the 1950s.

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

#295

I don't understand how "safe" AI can raise that much money. If anything, they will have to spend double the time on red-teaming before releasing anything commercially. "Unsafe" AI seems much more profitable.

> I don't understand how "safe" AI can raise that much money.

enterprises, corps, banks, governments will want to buy "safe" AI, to push liability for mistakes on someone who proclaimed them "safe".

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

#297

“…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 ??

If you raise 1B in VC, it'd be shame to burn it all at once :D

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

#298
This is also (if the valuation of 5 bio is to be trusted) a tentative answer to the question of Ilya's++ relative AI worth to the market at this point: A lot lower than hn and tech inclined spaces wanted to give him credit for during the past OpenAI turbulences.

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

#299

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?

> superintelligence is reached i read the article but I am not sure how they know when this condition will be true. Is this obvious to ppl reading this article? is it emperor has no clothes type situation ?

You are not alone. This is the litmus test many people are contemplating for a long time now, mostly philosophers, which is not surprising since it is a philosophical question. Most of the heavy stuff is hidden behind paywalls, but here's a nice summary of the state of the art by two CS guys: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.06721
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