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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

#321

Post by pembrook »

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…

While I get the cynicism (and yes, there is certainly some dumb money involved), it’s important to remember that every tech company that’s delivered 1000X returns was also seen as ridiculously overhyped/overvalued in its early days. Every. Single. One. It’s the same story with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, etc. etc.

That’s the point of venture capital; making extremely risky bets spread across a wide portfolio in the hopes of hitting the power law lottery with 1-3 winners.

Most funds will not beat the S&P 500, but again, that’s the point. Risk and reward are intrinsically linked.

In fact, due to the diversification effects of uncorrelated assets in a portfolio (see MPT), even if a fund only delivers 5% returns YoY after fees, that can be a great outcome for investors. A 5% return uncorrelated to bonds and public stocks is an extremely valuable financial product.

It’s clear that humans find LLMs valuable. What companies will end up capturing a lot of that value by delivering the most useful products is still unknown. Betting on one of the biggest names in the space is not a stupid idea (given the purpose of VC investment) until it actually proves itself to be in the real world.

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

#322

Post by twobitshifter »

avocardio wrote: post #58

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.

Safe super-intelligence will likely be as safe as OpenAI is open.

We can’t build critical software without huge security holes and bugs (see crowdstrike) but we think we will be able to contain something smarter than us? It would only take one vulnerability.

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

#323

Post by theGnuMe »

aithrowaway1987 wrote: post #152
davedx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

There was a very good paper in Nature showing this definitively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437933 Modern ANN architectures are not actually capable of long-term learning in the same way animals are, even stodgy old dogs that don't learn new tricks. ANNs are not a plausible model for the brain, even if they emulate certain parts of the brain (the cerebellum, but not the cortex) I will add that transformer…

You can always convert a recursive function call to a loop.

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

#324

Post by rpozarickij »

dartos wrote: post #109
sirspacey wrote: post #85

Lots 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’…

All I’m saying is you used the word “if” a lot there. AGI assumes exponential, preferably infinite and continuous improvement, something unseen before in business or nature. Neither siri nor Alexa were sold as AGI and neither alone come close to a $1B product. gpt and other LLMs has quickly become a commodity, with AI companies racing to the bottom for inference costs. I don’t really see the plan, product wise. Moreo…

> literally nothing in the observed universe does

There are many things on earth that don't exist anywhere else in the universe (as far as we know). Life is one of them. Just think how unfathomably complex human brains are compared to what's out there in space.

Just because something doesn't exist anywhere in the universe doesn't mean that humans can't create it (or humans can't create a machine that creates something that doesn't exist anywhere else) even if it might seem unimaginably complex.

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

#325

Post by theGnuMe »

shwaj wrote: post #292
barrell wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We know architecture and training procedures matter in practice.

MLPs and transformers are ultimately theoretically equivalent. That means there is an MLP that represent the any function a given transformer can. However, that MLP is hard to identify and train.

Also the transformer contains MLPs as well...

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

#326

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #217
liminvorous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one had built a nuclear bomb before the Manhattan project either.

this is not evidence in favor of your position. We could use this to argue in favor of anything such as “humans will eventually develop time travel” or “we will have cost effective fusion power”. The fact is many things we’ve tried to develop for decades still don’t exist. Nothing is guaranteed

Humans are an existing proof of human level intelligence. There are only two fundamental possibilities why this could not be replicated in silicon:

1. There is a chemical-level nature to intelligence which prevents other elements like silicon from being used as a substrate for intelligence

2. There is a non material aspect to intelligence that cannot be replicated except by humans

To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence that either are true and there is already a large body of evidence that implies that intelligence happens at a higher level of abstraction than the individual chemical reactions of synapses, ie. the neural network, which does not rely on the existence of any specific chemicals in the system except in as much as they perform certain functions that seemingly could be performed by other materials. If anything, this is more like speculating that there is a way to create energy from sunlight using plants as an existence proof of the possibility of doing so. More specifically, this is a bet that an existing physical phenomenon can be replicated using a different substrate.

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

#327

Post by EGreg »

mgfist wrote: post #234
EGreg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opportunit…

Presumably the private and the general are in the SAME organization and yes, the avenues for advancement are available equally to all, it’s based on merit and the rules are clear.

The analogy would be if the private could become a major overnight because they knew a guy.

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

#328

Post by machiaweliczny »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #250
nilkn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> 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. And what I'm saying is that I find that argument to be incredibly weak. I've seen it time and time again, and honestly at this point just feels like a "humans should be a hundred feet tall based on on their rate of change in their early years" argument. While I've also been amazed at…

Happy to review this in 5 years

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

#329

Post by EGreg »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #208
EGreg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those people weren’t handed that success. You are acting as if they were born billionaires, which is far from true. It’s not personally my goal to amass immense wealth and start giant companies (I would rather work minimally and live hedonically) but I am impressed by those that do so.

No, I’m saying it was those who went to silicon valley and got lucky to strike up relationships with CAPITAL who made it.

Overwhelmingly talent isnt sufficient. For most startups, the old boys network gets to choose who gets millions. And the next rounds a few people choose who will get billions.

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

#330

Post by jedberg »

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…

The TMV (Total Market Value) of solving AGI is infinity. And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero.

The play here is to basically invest in all possible players who might reach AGI, because if one of them does, you just hit the infinite money hack.

And maybe with SSI you've saved the world too.

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