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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

#301

Post by pajeets »

hintymad wrote: post #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.

to be honestly from the way "safe" and "alignment" is perceived on r/LocalLLaMA in two years its not going to be very appealing.

We'll be able to generate most of Chat GPT4o's capabilities locally on affordable hardware including "unsafe" and "unaligned" data as the noise-to-qubits is drastically reduced meaning smaller quantized models that can run on good enough hardware.

We'll see a huge reduction in price and inference times within two years and whatever SSI is trained on won't be economically viable to recoup that $1B investment guaranteed.

all depends on GPT-5's performance. Right now Sonnet 3.5 is the best but theres nothing really ground breaking. SSI's success will depend on how much uplift it can provide over GPT-5 which already isn't expected to be significant leap beyond GPT4

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

#302

Post by pajeets »

duxup wrote: post #17
ramraj07 wrote: post #2

Getting funded by a16z is if anything a sign that the field is not hot anymore.

Why is that?

Might be the almost securities fraud they were doing with crypto when it was fizzling out in 2022

Regardless, point is moot, money is money, and a16z's money isn't their money but other people's money

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

#303

Post by bschmidt1 »

vidarh wrote: post #281
bschmidt1 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are class actions now like https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/business/clearview-ai-fac... Nobody even knew what OpenAI was up to when they were gathering training data - they got away with a lot. Now there is precedent and people are paying more attention. Data that was previously free/open now has a clause that it can't be used for AI training. OpenAI didn't have to deal with any of that. Also OpenAI used che…

There are at least 3 companies with staff in developed countries well above minimum wage doing tagging and creation of training data, and at least one of them that I have an NDA with pays at least some of their staff tech contractor rates for data in some niches and even then some of data gets processed by 5+ people before it's returned to the client. Since I have ended up talking to 3, and I'm hardly well connected…

> A lot of this data - what I've seen anyway, is far cleaner than anything you'll find on the open web, with significant data on human preferences, validation, cited sources, and in the case of e.g. coding with verification that the code runs and works correctly.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing that detail. As someone who has tinkered with tokenizing/training I quickly found out this must be the case. Some people on HN don't know this. I've argued here with otherwise smart people who think there is no data preprocessing for LLMs, that they don't need it because "vectors", failing to realize the semantic depth and quality of embeddings depends on the quality of training data.

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

#304

Post by padolsey »

almost_usual wrote: post #39
_ttg wrote: post #32

i get that they're probably busy making AGI but surely they can spare a few hours to make a proper website? or is this some 4d-chess countersignalling i'm too stupid to notice?

What’s wrong with their website? Seems fast and gives me the information I need. What’s mildly annoying to me is their domain only returns an A record.

> gives me the information I need.

I mean, I'd like at least a brief blurb about their entire premise of safety. Maybe a definition or indication of a public consultation or... something.. otherwise the insinuation is that these three dudes are gonna sit around defining it on instinct, as if it's not a ludicrously hard human problem.

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

#305

Post by pajeets »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #267
petulla wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ilya has discussed this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUclZdj_Sc

Thank you very much for posting! This is exactly what I was looking for. On one hand, I understand what he's saying, and that's why I have been frustrated in the past when I've heard people say "it's just fancy autocomplete" without emphasizing the awesome capabilities that can give you. While I haven't seen this video by Sutskever before, I have seen a very similar argument by Hinton: in order to get really good at…

I actually echo your exact sentiments. I don't have the street cred but watching him talk for the first few minutes I immediately felt like there is just no way we are going to get AGI with what we know today.

Without some raw reasoning (maybe Neuro-symbolic is the answer maybe not) capacity, LLM won't be enough. Reasoning is super tough because its not as easy as predicting the next most likely token.

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

#306

Post by gigatexal »

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen.

Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just that all these companies will vie for a winner-take-all situation where the “best” model will garner the subscription? Doesn’t OpenAI make some substantial part of the revenue for all the AI space? I just don’t see it. But I don’t have VC levels of cash to bet on a 10x or 100x return so what do I know?

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

#307

Post by subsubzero »

digging wrote: post #145
paxys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era? Minus the urgency, scientific process, well-defined goals, target dates, public ownership, accountability...

Interesting attributes to mention... The urgency was faked and less true of the Manhattan Project than it is of AGI safety. There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest, saying it was unnecessary and dangerous. However, the race to develop AGI is very real, and we also have no way of knowing how close anyone is t…

I agree and also disagree.

> There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest

You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a downward trajectory due to essentially an entire generation dying or being extremely traumatized. If the US did not have Nagasaki and Hiroshima we would probably not have the space program and US technical prowess post WWII, so a totally different reality than where we are today.

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

#308

Post by riku_iki »

HaukeHi wrote: post #191
christianqchung wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If London has the best AI researchers in the world, why are all the top companies (minus Mistral) American?

Demis Hassabis says that half of all innovations that caused the recent AI boom came from DeepMind, which is London based.

his opinion is obviously biased.

If we say that half of innovations came from Alphabet/Google, then most of them (transformers, LLMs, tensorflow) came from Google Research and not Deep Mind.

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

#309

Post by jungturk »

gigatexal wrote: post #306

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen. Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just tha…

For at least some of the investors, a successful exit doesn't require building a profitable business.

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

#310

Post by light_triad »

gigatexal wrote: post #306

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen. Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just tha…

My guess (not a VC) is they’ll sell ‘private’ models where safety is a priority: healthcare, government, finance, the EU…
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