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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

#341

Post by calf »

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've read the abstract wrong. The authors argue that neural networks can learn online and a necessary condition is random information. That's the thesis, their thesis is not that neural networks are the wrong paradigm.

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

#342

Post by linotype »

jedberg wrote: post #330
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.

What does money even mean then?

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

#343

Post by calf »

sva_ wrote: post #121
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...

The neural networks in human brains are very different from artificial neural networks though. In particular, they seem to learn in a very different way than backprop. But there is no reason the company can't come up with a different paradigm.

Do we know that? I've seem some articles and lectures this year that kind of almost loosely argue and reach for the notion that "human backprop" happens when we sleep and dream, etc. I know that's handwavy and not rigorous, but who knows what's going on at this point.

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

#344

Post by gigatexal »

gigatexal wrote: post #338
pembrook wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> 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. Really? Selling goods online (Amazon) is not AGI. It didn’t take a huge leap to t…

I’m not voting with my wallet I’m just a guy yelling from the cheap seats. I’m probably wrong too. The VC world exists. Money has been made. Billions in returns. Entire industries and generations of people owe their livelihoods to these once VC backed industries.

If / when AGI happens can we make sure it’s not the Matrix?

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

#345

Post by reducesuffering »

Yizahi wrote: post #47
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?

There is significant possibility that true AI (what Ilia calls superintelligence) is impossible to build using neural networks. So it is closer to some tokenbro project than to nuclear research. Or he will simply shift goalposts, and call some LLM superintelligent.

The only goalposts shifting are the ones who think completely blowing past the Turing Test, unlocking recursive exponential code generation, and a computer passing all the college standard tests (our way of determining human intelligence to go Harvard/MIT) better than 99% of humans, isn't a very big deal.

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

#346

Post by svnt »

pembrook wrote: post #321
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 wi…

> Risk and reward are intrinsically linked

There are innumerable ways to increase your risk without increasing your potential reward.

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

#347

Post by linotype »

alpha_squared wrote: post #283
whimsicalism wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what laws have actually changed that make it no longer okay? we all know that openai did it

A lot of APIs changed in response to OpenAI hoovering up data. Reddit's a big one that comes to mind. I'd argue that the last two years have seen the biggest change in the openness of the internet.

It’s made Reddit unusable without an account, which makes me wonder why it’s even on the web anymore and not an app. I guess legacy users that only use a web browser.

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

#348

Post by machiaweliczny »

appplication wrote: post #225
m4rtink wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add that the tracks have not even been built &trains purchased and we are back at google old railway craze/bubble! Do YOU want to miss out being a share holder on this new line that will bring immeasurable wealth ?? ;-)

Imagine being in a position where you can spend $1B on a high risk gamble, unconcerned if you lose it all, all in pursuit of more wealth. Simultaneously too wealthy to imagine and never wealthy enough. Capitalism is quite the drug.

Me after watching channel5 I think some of it should go to poor people instead of billion dollars roulettes only. Thought the problem is with even richer corporations I feel and financial derivatives and not fully here.

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

#349

Post by calf »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #331
nilkn wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting the rate of progress to drop off so abruptly after realistically just a few years of serious work on the problem seems like the more unreasonable and grander prediction to me than expecting it to continue at its current pace for even just 5 more years.

The problem is that the rate of progress over the past 5/10/15 years has not been linear at all, and it's been pretty easy to point out specific inflection points that have allowed that progress to occur. I.e. the real breakthrough that allowed such rapid progress was transformers in 2017. Since that time, the vast majority of the progress has simply been to throw more data at the problem, and to make the models bigg…

Could it be argued that transformers are only possible because of Moore's law and the amount of processing power that could do these computations in a reasonable time? How complex is the transformer network really, every lay explanation I've seen basically says it is about a kind of parallelized access to the input string. Which sounds like a hardware problem, because the algorithmic advances still need to run on reasonable hardware.

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

#350

Post by jedberg »

linotype wrote: post #342
jedberg wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does money even mean then?

Honestly, I have no idea. I think we need to look to Hollywood for possible answers.

Maybe it means a Star Trek utopia of post-scarcity. Maybe it will be more like Elysium or Altered Carbon, where the super rich basically have anything they want at any time and the poor are restricted from access to the post-scarcity tools.

I guess an investment in an AGI moonshot is a hedge against the second possibility?

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