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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

#451

Post by astrange »

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.

> And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero.

This isn't true for the reason economics is called "the dismal science". A slaveowner called it that because the economists said slavery was inefficient and he got mad at them.

In this case, you're claiming an AGI would make everything free because it will gather all resources and do all work for you for free. And a human level intelligence that works for free is… a slave. (Conversely if it doesn't want to actually demand anything for itself it's not generally intelligent.)

So this won't happen because slavery is inefficient - it suppresses demand relative to giving the AGI worker money which it can use to demand things itself. (Like start a business or buy itself AWS credits or get a pet cat.)

Luckily, adding more workers to an economy makes it better, it doesn't cause it to collapse into unemployment.

tldr if we invented AGI the AGI would replace every job, it would simply get a job.

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

#452

Post by bottlepalm »

fsndz wrote: post #151

All that money, we are not even sure we can build AGI. What is AGI. Clearly scaling LLMs won't cut it, but VCs keep funding people because they pretend they can build super intelligence. I don't see that happening in the next 5 years: https://medium.com/@fsndzomga/there-will-be-no-agi-d9be9af44...

What’s your evidence that scaling won’t improve AI?

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

#453

Post by fakedang »

digging wrote: post #365
subsubzero wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and also disagree. > There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a…

Did you stop reading my comment there? I debunked this already.

> the atomic bombs weren't necessary to end the war with Japan either. (It can't be said with certainty one way or the other, but there's pretty strong evidence that their existence was not the decisive factor in surrender.)

Well, you didn't provide any evidence. Island hopping in the Pacific theater itself took thousands of lives, imagine what a headlong strike into a revanchist country of citizens determined to fight to the last man, woman and child would have looked like. We don't know how effective a hypothetical Soviet assault would have looked like as they had attacked sparsely populated Sakhalin only. What the atom bomb succeeded was in convincing Emperor Hirohito that continuing the war would be destructively pointless.

WW1 practically destroyed the British Empire for the most part. WW2 would have done the same for the US in your hypothetical scenario, but much worse.

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

#454

Post by astrange »

jedberg wrote: post #350
linotype wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post-scarcity is impossible because of positional goods. (ie, things that become more valuable not because they exist but because you have more of them than the other guy.)

Notice Star Trek writers forget they're supposed to be post scarcity like half the time, especially since Roddenberry isn't around to stop them from turning shows into generic millenial dramas. Like, Picard owns a vineyard or something? That's a rivalrous (limited) good, they don't have replicators for France.

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

#455

Post by alexilliamson »

paxys wrote: post #26
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?

> Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era? Minus the urgency, scientific process, well-defined goals, target dates, public ownership, accountability...

Well-defined goal is the big one. We wanted a big bomb.

What does AGI do? AGI is up against a philosophical barrier, not a technical one. We'll continue improving AI's ability to automate and assist human decisions, but how does it become something more? Something more "general"?

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

#456

Post by nwiswell »

nativeit wrote: post #253
Quinner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.

We all get to vote for that person.

Oh, that's super. I've been really impressed recently with the wisdom of our collective selections.

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

#457

Post by romeros »

snowwrestler wrote: post #445
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.

> 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.

The intuition is pretty spot on though. We don't need to get to AGI. Just making progress along the way to AGI can do plenty of damage.

1. AI-driven medical procedures: Healthcare Cost = $0. 2. Access to world class education: Cost of education = $0 3. Transportation: Cheap Autonomous vehicles powered by Solar. 4. Scientific research: AI will accelerate scientific progress by coming up with novel hypotheses and then testing them. 5. AI Law Enforcement: Will piece together all the evidence in a split second and come up with a fair judgement. Will prevent crime before it happens by analyzing body language, emotions etc.

Basically, this will accelerate UBI.

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

#458

Post by akomtu »

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.

Cows also have wants and needs, but who cares? They aren't the smartest species on the planet, so they're reduced to slaves.

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

#459

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #396
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And again, human brains are clearly limited in the number of steps it can compute without writing something down No - there is a loop between the cortex and thalamus, feeding the outputs of the cortex back in as inputs. Our brain can iterate for as long as it likes before initiating any motor output, if any, such as writing something down.

The brain's ability to iterate on information is still constrained by certain cognitive limitations like working memory capacity and attention span. In practice, the cortex-thalamus loop allows for some degree of internal iteration, but the brain cannot endlessly iterate without some form of external aid (e.g., writing something down) to offload information and prevent cognitive overload. I'm not telling you anything…

What's your point?

The discussion is about the architecturally imposed limitations of LLMs, resulting in capabilities that are way less than that of a brain.

The fact that the brain has it's own limits doesn't somehow negate this fact!

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

#460

Post by ein0p »

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.

If it is shown to be doable literally every major nation state (basically the top 10 by GDP) is going to have it in a year or two. Same with nuclear fusion. Secrecy doesn’t matter. Nor can you really maintain it indefinitely for something where thousands of people are involved.
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