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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

#441

Post by steveBK123 »

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.

Any business case that requires the introduction of infinity on the pros / zero on the cons is not a good business case.

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

#442

Post by parpfish »

jedberg wrote: post #339
gigatexal wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then the investment thesis hinges on what the investor thinks AGI’s chances are. 1/100 1/1M 1/1T? What if it never pans out is there infrastructure or other ancillary tech that society could benefit from? For example all the science behind the LHC, or bigger and better telescopes: we might never find the theory of everything but the tech that goes into space travel, the science of storing and processing all that d…

It's more game theory. Regardless of the chances of AGI, if you're not invested in it, you will lose everything if it happens. It's more like a hedge on a highly unlikely event. Like insurance. And we already seeing a ton of value in LLMs. There are lots of companies that are making great use of LLMs and providing a ton of value. One just launched today in fact: https://www.paradigmai.com/ (I'm an investor in that).…

i think the investment strategies change when you dump these astronomical sums into a company. it's not like roulette where you have a fixed probability of success and you figure out how much to bet on it -- dumping in a ton of cash can also increase the probability of success so it becomes more of a pay-to-win game

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

#443

Post by bobthecowboy »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #406
dcchambers wrote: post #336

Earlier 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…

> 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 aroun…

> Property rights will still have value. Manufacturing facilities will still have value. Social media sites will still have value.

I was with you on the first two, but the second one I don't get? We don't even have AGI right now, and social media sites are already increasingly viewed by many people I know as having dubious value. Adding LLM's to the mix lowers that value, if anything (spam/bots/nonsense go up). Adding AGI would seem to further reduce that value.

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

#444

Post by scarmig »

mentos wrote: post #408
brigadier132 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Infinity intelligence is a very vague and probably ill-defined concept; to go to an impossible extreme, if you're capable of modeling and predicting everything in the universe perfectly at zero cost, what would it even mean to be more intelligent?

That is a hard limit on intelligence, but neural networks can't even reach that. What is the actual limit? No one knows. Maybe it's something relatively close to that, modulo physical constraints. Maybe it's right above the maximum human intelligence (and evolution managed to converge to a near optimal architecture). No one knows.

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

#445

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

> 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.

I feel like these extreme numbers are a pretty obvious clue that we’re talking about something that is completely imaginary. Like I could put “perpetual motion machine” into those sentences and the same logic holds.

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

#446

Post by zooq_ai »

lo0dot0 wrote: post #430
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.

TMV can not be infinity because human wants and needs are not infinite.

What? Humans Infinite Needs and Desires will precisely be the driver for Infinite TMV

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

#447

Post by lawrenceyan »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #416
lawrenceyan wrote: post #394

Earlier 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…

> Agents replace large portions of the current service economy greatly increasing automation / efficiency for companies. > People continue to live their lives Presumably large numbers of those people no longer have jobs, and therefore no income. > we get human level AGI and hit a ceiling there Recently I've been wondering if our best chance for a brake on runaway non-hard-takeoff superintelligence would be that the e…

People will move from the service economy to the entertainment economy powered by Youtube, Tiktok, Mr. Beast, and others.

Half-joking. In seriousness, something like a UBI will most likely happen.

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

#448

Post by alexilliamson »

jedberg wrote: post #437
brigadier132 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A true super intelligence would need the ability to evolve, and would probably evolve its own wants and needs.

It would still need an objective to guide the evolution that was originally given by humans. Humans have the drive for survival and reproduction... what about AGI?

How do we go from a really good algorithm to an independently motivated, autonomous super intelligence with free reign in the physical world? Perhaps we should worry once we have robot heads of state and robot CEOs. Something tells me the current, human heads of state, and human CEOs would never let it get that far.

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

#449

Post by wavemode »

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…

SSI is not analogous to Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft. All of those companies had the technology, the only question was whether they'd be able to make money or not.

By contrast, SSI doesn't have the technology. The question is whether they'll be able to invent it or not.

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

#450

Post by rl3 »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #438
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.

I disagree. Anyone who solves AGI will probably just have their models and data confiscated by the government.

In addition, it's also a big assumption that money will continue to matter or hold its value in such a world.
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