Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 803 posts

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

#311

Post by gigatexal »

jungturk wrote: post #309
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.

I guess if they can get in early and then sell their stake to the next sucker then they’ll make back their investment plus some multiple. Seems like a Ponzi scheme of sorts. But oh well — looking forward to the HN post about what SSI inc puts out.

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

#312

Post by gigatexal »

light_triad wrote: post #310
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…

That could actually work if this LLM ai hype doesn’t die and is really actually useful

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

#313

Post by throwawayk7h »

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…

If Ilya is sincere in his belief about safe superintelligence being within reach in a decade or so, and the investors sincerely believe this as well, then the business plan is presumably to deploy the superintelligence in every field imaginable. "SSI" in pharmaceuticals alone would be worth the investment. It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation. I'm not an economist, but since the valuation is $5bn, it stands to reason that evaluators believe there is at most a 1 in 400 chance of success?

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

#316

Post by gigatexal »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #313
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…

If Ilya is sincere in his belief about safe superintelligence being within reach in a decade or so, and the investors sincerely believe this as well, then the business plan is presumably to deploy the superintelligence in every field imaginable. "SSI" in pharmaceuticals alone would be worth the investment. It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation. I'm…

I’m dubious about super intelligence. Maybe I’ve seen one too many sci-fi dystopian films but I guess yes, iif it can be done and be safe sure it’d be worth trillions.

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

#317

Post by zerocrates »

jckahn wrote: post #293
highfrequency wrote: post #42

“…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.

I interpreted the comment as incredulous that superintelligence is as close as a "couple years" away.

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

#318

Post by throwup238 »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #313
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…

If Ilya is sincere in his belief about safe superintelligence being within reach in a decade or so, and the investors sincerely believe this as well, then the business plan is presumably to deploy the superintelligence in every field imaginable. "SSI" in pharmaceuticals alone would be worth the investment. It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation. I'm…

> It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation.

The lowest hanging fruit aren't even that pie in the sky. The LLM doesn't need to be capable of original thought and research to be worth hundreds of billions, they just need to be smart enough to apply logic to analyze existing human text. It's not only a lot more achievable than a super AI that can control a bunch of lab equipment and run experiments, but also fits the current paradigm of training the LLMs on large text datasets.

The US Code and Code of Federal Regulations are on the order of 100 million tokens each. Court precedent contains at least 1000x as many tokens [1], when the former are already far beyond the ability of any one human to comprehend in a lifetime. Now multiply that by every jurisdiction in the world.

An industry of semi-intelligent agents that can be trusted to do legal research and can be scaled with compute power would be worth hundreds of billions globally just based on legal and regulatory applications alone. Allowing any random employee to ask the bot "Can I legally do X?" is worth a lot of money.

[1] based on the size of the datasets I've downloaded from the Caselaw project.

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

#319

Post by famouswaffles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #288
famouswaffles wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not sloppy. It just doesn't matter in the limit of training. 1. An Octopus and a Raven have wildly different brains. Both are intelligent. So just the idea that there is some "one true system" that the NN must discover or converge on is suspect. Even basic arithmetic has numerous methods. 2. In the limit of training on a diverse dataset (ie as val loss continues to go down), it will converge on the process (what…

No amount of training would cause a fly brain to be able to do what an octopus or bird brain can, or to model their behavioral generating process. No amount of training will cause a transformer to magically sprout feedback paths or internal memory, or an ability to alter it's own weights, etc. Architecture matters. The best you can hope for an LLM is that training will converge on the best LLM generating process it c…

>No amount of training would cause a fly brain to be able to do what an octopus or bird brain can, or to model their behavioral generating process.

Go back a few evolutionary steps and sure you can. Most ANN architectures basically have relatively little to no biases baked in and the Transformer might be the most blank slate we've built yet.

>No amount of training will cause a transformer to magically sprout feedback paths or internal memory, or an ability to alter it's own weights, etc.

A transformer can perform any computation it likes in a forward pass and you can arbitrarily increase inference compute time with the token length. Feedback paths? Sure. Compute inefficient? Perhaps. Some extra programming around the Model to facilitate this ? Maybe but the architecture certainly isn't stopping you.

Even if it couldn't, limited =/ trivial. The Human Brain is not Turing complete.

Internal Memory ? Did you miss the memo ? Recurrency is overrated. Attention is all you need.

That said, there are already state keeping language model architectures around.

Altering weights ? Can a transformer continuously train ? Sure. It's not really compute efficient but architecture certainly doesn't prohibit it.

>Architecture matters

Compute Efficiency? Sure. What it is capable of learning? Not so much

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

#320

Post by signatoremo »

torginus wrote: post #103
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?

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…

He was on the record that their first product will be a safe superintelligence and it won’t do anything else until then, which sounds like they won’t have paid customers until they can figure out how to build a superintelligent model. That’s certainly a lofty goal and a very long term play.
Post reply on HN