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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

#471

Post by kelnos »

romeros wrote: post #457
snowwrestler wrote: post #445

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. 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…

I don't think that follows. Prices are set by market forces, not by cost (though cost is usually a hard floor).

Waymo rides cost within a few tens of cents of Uber and Lyft rides. Waymo doesn't have to pay a driver, so what's the deal? It costs a lot to build those cars and build the software to run them. But also Waymo doesn't want a flood of people such that there's always zero availability (with Uber and Lyft they can at least try to recruit more drivers when demand goes up, but with Waymo they have to build more cars and maintain and operate them), so they set their prices similarly to what others pay for a similar (albeit with human driver) service.

I'm also reminded of Kindle books: the big promise way back when is that they'd be significantly cheaper than paperbacks. But if you look around today, the prices on Kindle books are similar to that of paperbacks, even more expensive sometimes.

Sure, when costs go down, companies in competitive markets will lower prices in order to gain or maintain market share. But I'm not convinced that any of those things you mention will end up being competitive markets.

Just wanted to mention:

> 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.

No thanks. Current law enforcement is filled with issues, but AI law enforcement sounds like a hellish dystopia. It's like Google's algorithms terminating your Google account... but instead you're in prison.

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

#472

Post by motohagiography »

CFO's here, let's say I raise a round like that. What do you do with $1B in cash to manage it in the short and near term though? Is it just stuck in the money market or t-bills or what? Even if the growth of the company is the main bet, that cash has to exist as something with a better return than cash.

I assume that service is what SV bank provided before it tanked, but someone has to manage that cash for the few years it takes to burn through it. What kind of service do you park that in.

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

#473

Post by astrange »

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?

Same thing it does now. AGI isn't enough to have a command economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

nb I am not endorsing Austrian economics but it is a pretty good overview of a problem nobody has solved yet. Modern society has only existed for 100ish years so you can never be too sure about anything.

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

#474

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #403
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Increasing number of layers isn't a smart way to solve it. It order to be able to reason effectively and efficiently the model needs to use as much, or as little, compute as needed for a given task. Completing "1+1=" should take less compute steps than "A winning sequence for white here is ...".

This lack of "variable compute" is a widely recognized shortcoming of transformer-based LLMs, and there are plenty of others. The point apropos this thread is that you can't just train an LLM to be something that it is not. If the generating process required variable compute (maybe 1000's of steps) - e.g. to come up with a chess move - then no amount of training can make the LLM converge to model this generative process... the best it can do is to model the outcome of the generative process, not the process itself. The difference is that without having learnt the generative process, the model will fail when presented with a novel input that it didn't see during training, and therefore didn't memorize the "cheat sheet" answer for.

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

#475

Post by kelnos »

astrange wrote: post #454
jedberg wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> things that become more valuable not because they exist but because you have more of them than the other guy.

But if you can simply ask the AI to give you more of that thing, and it gives it to you, free of charge, that fixes that issue, no?

> 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 limited good.

God, yes, so annoying. Even DS9 got into the currency game with the Ferengi obsession with gold-pressed latinum.

But also you can look at some of it as a lifestyle choice. Picard runs a vineyard because he likes it and thinks it's cool. Sorta like how some people think vinyl sounds better then lossless digital audio. There's certainly a lot of replicated wine that I'm sure tastes exactly like what you could grow, harvest, and ferment yourself. But the writers love nostalgia, so there's constantly "the good stuff" hidden behind the bar that isn't replicated.

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

#476

Post by astrange »

scarmig wrote: post #444
mentos wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, modu…

> if you're capable of modeling and predicting everything in the universe perfectly at zero cost

As far as we know, it's impossible to model any part of the universe perfectly, although it usually doesn't matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

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

#477

Post by huevosabio »

motohagiography wrote: post #472

CFO's here, let's say I raise a round like that. What do you do with $1B in cash to manage it in the short and near term though? Is it just stuck in the money market or t-bills or what? Even if the growth of the company is the main bet, that cash has to exist as something with a better return than cash. I assume that service is what SV bank provided before it tanked, but someone has to manage that cash for the few ye…

They probably already went to investors with letters of sale from GPU/datacenter providers.

And 80% of those $1B will go from Founder Mode VC to Nvidia and Datacenter Management Co in the span of 6 months.

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

#478

Post by fakedang »

duxup wrote: post #37
phmagic wrote: post #6

Good news for NVDA.

Would be nice to be the sales rep assigned to that rando no name company ;)

Most likely it's some junior rep assigned to Sutskever's company after Ilya filled up an online "Contact Us for Pricing" form on the Nvidia website. /s

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

#479

Post by astrange »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #447
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The point of UBI or other welfare systems is for people we don't /want/ working, children and the elderly.

It's impossible to run out of work for people who are capable of it. As an example, if you have two people and a piece of paper, just tear up the paper into strips, call them money and start exchanging them. Congrats, you both have income now.

(This is assuming the AGI has solved the problem of food and stuff, otherwise they're going to have to trade for that and may run out of currency.)

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

#480

Post by laluser »

motohagiography wrote: post #472

CFO's here, let's say I raise a round like that. What do you do with $1B in cash to manage it in the short and near term though? Is it just stuck in the money market or t-bills or what? Even if the growth of the company is the main bet, that cash has to exist as something with a better return than cash. I assume that service is what SV bank provided before it tanked, but someone has to manage that cash for the few ye…

Short-term treasury bills from the government.
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