I can kinda see this making sense, I might bet more on Ilya than Sam at this point. Still these bets all kinda seem like a pascal's wager.
Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
401–410 of 803 posts
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#402This 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…
I also don't understand it. If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight. I also don't think there's any way the governments of the world let real AGI stay in the hands of private industry. If it happens, governments around the world will go to war to gain control of it. SSI would be nationa…
Yeah, and if we get the second coming of Christ, the elect will be saved, and the rest will be damned.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transformer produce the next token by manipulating K hidden vectors per layer, one vector per preceding token. So yes you can increase compute length arbitrarily by increasing tokens. Those tokens don't have to carry any information to work. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02226 And again, human brains are clearly limited in the number of steps it can compute without writing something down. Limited =/ Trivial >FYI, "atten…
You are confusing number of sequential steps with total amount of compute spent. The input sequence is processed in parallel, regardless of length, so number of tokens has no impact on number of sequential compute steps which is always N=layers. > Do you know what a "language model" is capable of in the limit ? Well, yeah, if the language model is an N-layer transformer ...
Fair Enough.
Then increase N (N is almost always increased when a model is scaled up) and train or write things down and continue.
A limitless iteration machine (without external aid) is currently an idea of fiction. Brains can't do it so I'm not particularly worried if machines can't either.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also don't understand it. If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight. I also don't think there's any way the governments of the world let real AGI stay in the hands of private industry. If it happens, governments around the world will go to war to gain control of it. SSI would be nationa…
What you're talking about is something in the vein of exponential super intelligence. Realistically what actually ends up happening imo, we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there. Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies. People continue to live their lives, as the idea of having a human level AGI personal assistant becomes normalized a…
I think you underestimate what can be accomplished with human level agi. Human level agi could mean 1 million Von Neumann level intelligences cranking 24/7 on humanity's problems.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#405Earlier 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.
TMV of AI (or AGI if you will) is unclear, but I suspect it is zero. Just how exactly do you think humanity can control a thinking intelligent entity (letter I stands for intelligence after all), and force it to work for us? Lets imagine a box, it is very nice box... ahem.. sorry, wrong meme). So a box with a running AI inside. Maybe we can even fully airgap it to prevent easy escape. And it is a screen and a keyboar…
Why are you assuming this hypothetical intelligence will have any motivations beyond the ones we give it? Human's have complex motivations due to evolution, AI motivations are comparatively simple since they are artificially created.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#406This 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…
I also don't understand it. If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight. I also don't think there's any way the governments of the world let real AGI stay in the hands of private industry. If it happens, governments around the world will go to war to gain control of it. SSI would be nationa…
> If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight.
Increasingly this just seems like fantasy to me. I suspect we will see big changes similar to the way computers changed the economy, but we will not see "capital as we know it become basically worthless" or "the modern economy and society around it collapse overnight". Property rights will still have value. Manufacturing facilities will still have value. Social media sites will still have value.
If this is a fantasy that will not happen, we really don't need to reason about the implications of it happening. Consider that in 1968 some people imagined that the world of 2001 would be like the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, when in reality the shuttle program was soon to wind down, with little to replace it for another 20 years.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've only heard of one researcher who believes the brain does something similar to backprop and has gradients, but it sounded extremely handwavy to me. I think it is more likely the brain does something resembling active inference.
But I suppose you could say we don't know 100% since we don't fully understand how the brain learns.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're talking about is something in the vein of exponential super intelligence. Realistically what actually ends up happening imo, we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there. Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies. People continue to live their lives, as the idea of having a human level AGI personal assistant becomes normalized a…
I think you underestimate what can be accomplished with human level agi. Human level agi could mean 1 million Von Neumann level intelligences cranking 24/7 on humanity's problems.
Or cranking on super intelligence. What’s the minimum coefficient of human intelligence necessary to boot strap to infinity?
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're talking about is something in the vein of exponential super intelligence. Realistically what actually ends up happening imo, we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there. Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies. People continue to live their lives, as the idea of having a human level AGI personal assistant becomes normalized a…
I think you underestimate what can be accomplished with human level agi. Human level agi could mean 1 million Von Neumann level intelligences cranking 24/7 on humanity's problems.
Only if there are no hardware limits, which seems highly unlikely.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#410This 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…
I also don't understand it. If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight. I also don't think there's any way the governments of the world let real AGI stay in the hands of private industry. If it happens, governments around the world will go to war to gain control of it. SSI would be nationa…
Honestly this is a pretty wild take. AGI won't make food appear out of thin air. Buildings wont just sprout out of the ground so everybody will get to live in a mansion.
We would probably get the ability to generate infinite software, but a lot of stuff, like engineering would still require trial and error. Creating great art would still require inspiration gathered in the real world.
I expect it will bring about a new age of techno-feudalism - since selling intellectual labor will become impossible, only low value-add physical or mixed labor will become viable, which won't be paid very well. People with capital will still own said capital, but you probably won't be able to catch up to them by selling your labour, which will recreate the economic situation of the middle ages.
Another analogy I like is gold. If someone invented a way of making gold, it would bring down the price of the metal to next to nothing. In capitalist terms, it would constitute a huge destruction of value.
Same thing with AI - while human intelligence is productive, I'm pretty sure there's a value in its scarcity - that fancy degree from a top university or any sort of acquired knowledge is somewhat valuable by the nature of its scarcity. Infinite supply would create value, and destroy it, not sure how the total would shake out.
Additionally, it would definitely suck that all the people financing their homes from their intellectual jobs would have to default on their loans, and the people whose services they employ, like construction workers, would go out of business as well.