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Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

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

#531
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?

The question isn’t whether scaling will improve AI. The question is whether the return is worth it. You can build a bigger pogo stick to jump higher, but no pogo stick will get you to the moon.

Chess is a pretty good example. You could theoretically train an LLM on just chess games. The problem is there are more chess positions than atoms in the universe. So you can’t actually do it in practice. And chess is a much more constrained environment than life. At any chess position there are only ~35 moves on average. Life has tons of long-tail situations which have never been seen before.

And for chess we already have superhuman intelligence. It doesn’t require trillion-dollar training clusters, you can run a superhuman chess bot on your phone. So there are clear questions of optimality as well: VC money should be aware of the opportunity cost in investing money under “infinite scaling” assumptions.

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take waymo regularly. It is not within a few cents of Lyft or Uber. It costs me, the consumer, 2x what Lyft or Uber would cost me. I paid $21 for a ride on Mon that was $9-10 across Uber and Lyft. I am price inquisitive so I always double check each time.

I guess the questions then are - why is it 2x the competing price, why do you willing pay 2x, and how many people are willing to pay that 2x? Consider they are competing against the Lyft/Uber asset-light model of relying on "contractors" who in many cases are incapable of doing the math to realize they are working for minimum wage...

All those businesses are predatory. It’s so crazy.

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

#533
It's incredible that "LLM scam" or "LLM grift" is still going on. They are doing everything to not lose those $200 bln, but it's gone. It's went into heat, gone gone. Anyone talking about "infinite value when AGI" needs to take a break. There is no such thing and if anyone's saying such "non-smart" things, means THEY HAVE NOTHING. And they understand nothing or are lying to you, and/or are invested in this scam and scared of losing it all. One example: Even if/when there is AGI, so what? What more could AGI tell about you so you could "buy more stuff" or "make you better"? Not much. So it's still personal data where bigger value lies. This BS has to end. I'm fed up. (We are.)

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

#534

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…

On the other hand, it may be that "Alignment likely generalizes further than capabilities." - https://www.beren.io/2024-05-15-Alignment-Likely-Generalizes...

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

#535
post #363

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…

AGI is likely but whether Ilya Sutskever will get there first or get the value is questionable. I kind of hope things will end up open source with no one really owning it.

So far, Sutskever has shown to be nothing but a dummy. Yes, he had a lucky break with belief that "moar data" will bring significant advancement. It was somewhat impressive, but ChatGPT -whatever- is just a toy. Nothing more. It breaks down immediately when any sign of intelligence or understanding would be needed. Someone being so much into LLMs or whatever implementation of ML is absolutely not someone who would be a good bet of inventing a real breakthrough. But they will burn a lot of value and make everyone of their ilk happy. Just like crypto bros.

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

#536

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…

At least this time, people are actually asking the question. NVDA::AI CSCO::.COM

Or possibly NT::.com

I remember seeing interviews with Nortel's CEO where he bragged that most internet backbone traffic was handled by Nortel hardware. Things didn't quite work out how he thought they were going to work out.

I think Nvidia is better positioned than Cisco or Nortel were during the dotcom crash, but does anyone actually think Nvidia's current performance is sustainable? It doesn't seem realistic to believe that.

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

#537
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this any different than the (lack of) business model of all the voice assistants? Feels very different to me. The dominant ones are run by Google, Apple, and Amazon, and the voice assistants are mostly add-on features that don't by themselves generate much (if any) revenue (well, aside from the news that Amazon wants to start charging for a more advanced Alexa). The business model there is more like "we need…

Hard to see normies signing up for monthly subs to VC funded AI startups when a surprisingly large % still are resistant to paying AAPL/GOOG for email/storage/etc. Getting a $10/mo uplift for AI functionality to your iCloud/GSuite/Office365/Prime is a hard enough sell as it stands. And again this against CapEx of something like $200B means $100/year per user is practically rounding to 0. Not to mention the OpEx to ac…

You'd be very surprised at how much they're raking in from the small sliver of people who do pay. It only seems small just because of how much more they make from other things. If you have a billion users, a tiny percentage of paying users is still a gazillion dollars. Getting to a billion users is the hard part. Theyre betting theyll figure how to monetize all those eyeballs when they get there.

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

#538

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…

My guess (not a VC) is they’ll sell ‘private’ models where safety is a priority: healthcare, government, finance, the EU…

Sure. Except that LLMs can not reason or do anything reliably. You can still believe that, of course, but it will not change reality.

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

#539

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?

Literally everyone from OpenAI lied 100% about everything of substance. Sutskever lied about "world model" inside of LLMs, which is such a despicable lie, because he knows that "latent space" is a TOTAL MESS. Proven everytime anyone looked at it. Shameless grifters. When end?

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

#540

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…

Current investors just need the co to be valued at $50B on the next round (likely, given fomo and hype) to make a 10X gain.

Actually converting it to cash? That doesn't happen anymore. Everyone just focuses on IRR and starts the campaign for Fund II.

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