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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

#551

Post by [deleted] »

steveBK123 wrote: post #493
furyofantares wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this any different than the (lack of) business model of all the voice assistants? Voice assistants do a small subset of the things you can already do easily on your phone. Competing with things you can already do easily on your phone is very hard; touch interfaces are extremely accessible, in many ways more accessible than voice. Current voice assistants only being able to do a small subset of that makes the…

OK so bull case on LLMs now is inclusive of "substantially rewriting all the worlds software to expose functionality to them via APIs" ?

[deleted]

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

#552

Post by nycdatasci »

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 think current models have demonstrated an advanced capacity to navigate “language space”. If we assume “software UI space” is a subset of the language space that is used to guide our interactions with software, then it’s fair to assume models will eventually be able to control operating systems and apps as well as the average human. I think the base case on value creation is a function of the productivity gain that results from using natural language instead of a user interface. So how much time do you spend looking at a screen each day and what is your time worth? And then there’s this option that you get: what if models can significantly exceed the capabilities of the average human?

Conservative math: 3B connected people x $0.50/day “value” x 364 days = $546B/yr. You can get 5% a year risk free, so let’s double it for the risk we’re taking. This yields $5T value. Is a $1B investment on someone who is a thought leader in this market an unreasonable bet?

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

#553

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #492
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

My point is that for some bizare reason, people have standards of reasoning (for machines) that only exist in fiction or their own imagination. It is beyond silly to dump an architecture for a limitation the human brain has. A reasoning engine that can iterate indefinitely with no external aid does not exist in real life. That the transformer also has this weakness is not any reason for it to have capabilities less t…

LLMs are here to stay until something better replaces them, and will be used for those things they are capable of.

It shouldn't be surprising they are not great at reasoning, or everything one would hope for from an AGI, since they simply were not built for that. If you look at the development history, the transformer was a successor to LSTM-based seq-2-seq models using Bahdanau attention, whose main goal was to more efficiently utilize parallel hardware by supporting parallel processing. Of course a good language model (word predictor) will look as if it's reasoning because it is trying to model the data it was trained on - a human reasoner.

As humans we routinely think for seconds/minutes or even hours before speaking or acting, while an LLM only has that fixed N steps (layers) of computation. I don't know why you claim this difference (among others) should make no difference, but it clearly does, with out-of-training-set reasoning weakness being a notable limitation that people such as Demis Hassabis have recently conceded.

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

#554

Post by ChumpGPT »

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…

Sometimes it's not about returns but about transferring wealth and helping out friends. Happens all the time. The seed money will get out, all the rest of the money will get burned.

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

#555

Post by visarga »

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.

Even if you automate stuff, you still need raw materials and energy. They are limited resources, you can certainly not have an infinity of them at will. Developing AI will also cost money. Remember that humans are also self-replicator HGIs, yet we are not infinite in numbers.

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

#556

Post by sirspacey »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #200

Lots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in…

Two interesting points to consider

1. If it’s really amazing autocomplete, is there a distinction between AGI?

Being able to generalize, plan, execute, evaluate and learn from the results could all be seen as a search graph building on inference from known or imagined data points. So far LLMs are being used on all of those and we haven’t even tested the next level of compute power being built to enable its evolution.

2. Fancy autocomplete is a bit broad for the comprehensive use cases CUDA is already supporting that go way beyond textual prediction.

If all information of every type can be “autocompleted” that’s a pretty incredible leap for robotics.

* edited to compensate for iPhone autocomplete, the irony.

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

#557

Post by stephenitis »

xenospn wrote: post #314
highfrequency wrote: post #42

“…a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market," Gross said in an interview.” A couple years ??

Just until the $50B series A

We need to inflation adjust the concept of unicorns.

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

#558

Post by stephenitis »

coding123 wrote: post #519

3 takes from me: Pre-Series A $1B? Wow Remember when Facebook acquired insta for $1B and everyone freaked out? I guess inflation happens here first. Finally, will Sutskever face the same charges as Holmes when he fails to deliver AGI?

Holmes defrauded physics.

Sutskever is asking for funds for a research project that hopefully will end in a profitable SSI/AGI.

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

#559

Post by jhylau »

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…

VCs at the big/mega funds make most of their money from fees, they don't actually care as much about the potential portfolio investment exits 10-15 years from now. What they care MOST about is the ability to raise another fund in 2-3 years, so they can milk more fees from LPs. i.e. 2% fee PER YEAR on a 5bn fund is a lot of guaranteed risk-free money.

To be able to achieve that is entirely dependent on two things:

1) deploying capital in the current fund on 'sexy' ideas so they can tell LPs they are doing their job

2) paper markups, which they will get, since Ilya will most definitely be able to raise another round or two at a higher valuation. even if it eventually goes bust or gets sold at cost.

With 1) and 2), they can go back to their existing fund LPs and raise more money for their next fund and milk more fees. Getting exits and carry is just the cherry on top for these megafund VCs.

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

#560

Post by signatoremo »

lupire wrote: post #370
signatoremo wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was on the record that their first product will be a safe superintelligence and it won’t do anything else until then, which sounds like they won’t have paid customers until they can figure out how to build a superintelligent model. That’s certainly a lofty goal and a very long term play.

OpenAI was "on the record" with a lot of obsolete claims too. Money changes people.

He didn’t promise world peace nor did he claim his work belongs to the humanity. The company is still a for profit corporation.

He is saying he will try to build something head and shoulders above anything else, and he got a billion dollars to do it with no expectation of revenue until his product is ready. The likelihood that he fails is very high, but his backers are willing to bet on that.

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