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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

#521

Post by idiocrat »

furyofantares wrote: post #425
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…

I'm not a VC so maybe you don't care what I think, I'm not sure. Last night as my 8yo was listening to childrens audio books going to sleep, she asked me to have it alternate book A then B then A then B. I thought, idunno maybe I can work out a way to do this. Maybe the app has playlists and maaaaaaaaaaybe has a way to set a playlist on repeat. Or maybe you just can't do this in the app at all. I just sat there and s…

Talking to an electronic assistant is so antiquated. It feels unnatural to formulate inner thoughts into verbal commands.

An ubiquitous phone has enough sensors/resources to be fully situationally aware and preempt/predict for each holder any action long time ahead.

It can measure the pulse, body postures and movements, gestures, breath patterns, calculate mood, listen to the surrounding sounds, recall all information ever discussed, have 360 deg visual information (via a swarm of fully autonomous flying micro-drones), be in an network with all relevant parties (family members, friends, coworkers, community) and know everything they (the peers) know.

From all gathered information the electronic personal assistant can predict all your next steps with high confidence. The humans think that they are unique, special and unpredictable, but opposite is the case. An assistant can know more about you than you think you know about yourself.

So your 8yo daughter does not need to tell how to alternate the audio books, the computer can feel the mood and just do what is appropriate, without her need to issue a verbal command.

Also in the morning you do not need to ask her how she slept tonight and listen to her subjective judgement.

The personal assistant will feel that you are probably interested in your daughters sleep and give you an exact objective medical analysis of the quality of the sleep of your daughter tonight, without you needing to ask the personal assistant of your daughter.

I love it, it is a bottomless goldmine for data analysis!

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

#522

Post by reissbaker »

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…

In general VC is about investing in a large number of companies that mostly fail, and trying to weight the portfolio to catch the few black swans that generate insane returns. Any individual investment is likely to fail, but you want to have a thesis for 1) why it could theoretically be a black swan, and 2) strong belief in the team to execute. Here's a thesis for both of these for SSI:

1. The black swan: if AGI is achievable imminently, the first company to build it could have a very strong first mover advantage due to the runaway effect of AI that is able to self-improve. If SSI achieves intelligence greater than human-level, it will be faster (and most likely dramatically cheaper) for SSI to self-improve than anyone external can achieve, including open-source. Even if open-source catches up to where SSI started, SSI will have dramatically improved beyond that, and will continue to dramatically improve even faster due to it being more intelligent.

2: The team. Basically, Ilya Sutskever was one of the main initial brains behind OpenAI from a research perspective, and in general has contributed immensely to AI research. Betting on him is pretty easy.

I'm not surprised Ilya managed to raise a billion dollars for this. Yes, I think it will most likely fail: the focus on safety will probably slow it down relative to open source, and this is a crowded space as it is. If open source gets to AGI first, or if it drains the market of funding for research labs (at least, research labs disconnected from bigtech companies) by commoditizing inference — and thus gets to AGI first by dint of starving its competitors of oxygen — the runaway effects will favor open-source, not SSI. Or if AGI simply isn't achievable in our lifetimes, SSI will die by failing to produce anything marketable.

But VC isn't about betting on likely outcomes, because no black swans are likely. It's about black swan farming, which means trying to figure out which things could be black swans, and betting on strong teams working on those.

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

#523

Post by hello_moto »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #435
kimbler wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These VC’s are already lining up the exit as they are investing. They all sit on the boards of major corps and grease the acquisitions all the way through. The hit rate of the top funds is all about connections and enablement.

So it's all just fleecing money from mega corps? (Cue the "Always has been" meme?)

Those mega-corps become big thanks to the same network of VCs.

People should have realized it by now that Silicon Valley exist because of this.

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

#524

Post by superaffective »

reissbaker wrote: post #522
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…

In general VC is about investing in a large number of companies that mostly fail, and trying to weight the portfolio to catch the few black swans that generate insane returns. Any individual investment is likely to fail, but you want to have a thesis for 1) why it could theoretically be a black swan, and 2) strong belief in the team to execute. Here's a thesis for both of these for SSI: 1. The black swan: if AGI is a…

Another take is defining AGI from an economic perspective. If AI can do a job that would normally be paid a salary, then it could be paid similarly or at a smaller price which is still big.

OpenAI priced its flagship chatbot ChatGPT on the low end for early product adoption. Let's see what jobs get replaced this year :)

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

#526

Post by janalsncm »

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?

No. The Manhattan Project started after we understood the basic mechanism of runaway fission reactions. The funding was mostly spent purifying uranium.

AGI would be similar if we understood the mechanism of creating general intelligence and just needed to scale it up. But there are still fundamental questions we still aren’t close to understanding for AGI.

A more apt comparison today is probably something like fusion reactors although progress has been slow there too. We know how fusion works in theory. We have done it before (thermonuclear weapons). There are sub-problems we need to solve, but people are working on them. For AGI we don’t even know what the sub-problems are yet.

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

#527

Post by damanoman »

bdcravens wrote: post #119
danielovichdk wrote: post #44

"It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel." Why Tel Aviv in Israel ?

Why not? The Bay isn't the only place with talent. Many of the big tech powerhouse companies already have offices there. There's also many Israeli nationals working the US that may find moving back closer to family a massive advantage.

Is it as open to outsiders as the Bay is? I’m Asian for example and it seems the society there is far more homogenous than in the Bay. I have no idea so I’m curious.

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

#528

Post by WanderPanda »

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 St. Petersburg paradox is where hypers and doomers meet apparently. Pricing the future infinitely good and infinitely bad to come to the wildest conclusions

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

#529

Post by crappybird »

apwell23 wrote: post #144
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?

> superintelligence is reached i read the article but I am not sure how they know when this condition will be true. Is this obvious to ppl reading this article? is it emperor has no clothes type situation ?

They can dilute the term to whatever they want. I think when the pressure to release becomes too high, they can just stick a patch of "Superintelligence™" on their latest LLM and release it.

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

#530

Post by mrshadowgoose »

hyeonwho4 wrote: post #488
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. There's a paradox which appears when AI GDP gets to be greater than say 50% of world GDP: we're pumping up all these economic numbers, generating all the electricity and computational substrate, but do actual humans benefit, or is it economic growth for economic growth's…

> Where is the value for actual humans?

In a lot of the less rosy scenarios for AGI end-states, there isn't.

Once humans are robbed of their intrinsic value (general intelligence), the vast majority of us will become not only economically worthless, but liabilities to the few individuals that will control the largest collectives of AGI capacity.

There is certainly a possible end-state where AGI ushers in a post-scarcity utopia, but that would be solely at the whims of the people in power. Given the very long track record of how people in power generally behave towards vulnerable populations, I don't really see this ending well for most of us.

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