Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by conradev » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:06 AM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #585

jhylau wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

I’m not a VC, but I doubt that’s true. You can exactly raise one fund if you operate like that but not two or three.

You could actually raise and deploy two or three funds that way, before you see returns for the first

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

#602

Post by airspresso » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:07 AM UTC

damanoman wrote: post #511

throwawayk7h wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Ilya is sincere in his belief about safe superintelligence being within reach in a decade or so, and the investors sincerely believe this as well, then the business plan is presumably to deploy the superintelligence in every field imaginable. "SSI" in pharmaceuticals alone would be worth the investment. It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation. I'm…

Let’s be real. Having worked at $tech companies, I’m cynical and believe that AGI will basically be used for improving adtech and executing marketing campaigns.

It's good to envision what we'd actually use AGI for. Assuming it's a system you can give an objective to and it'll do whatever it needs to do to meet it, it's basically a super smart agent. So people and companies will employ it to do the tedious and labor intensive tasks they already do manually, in good old skeuomorphic ways. Like optimising advertising and marketing campaigns. And over time we'll explore more novel ways of using the super smart agent.

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

#603

Post by khafra » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:10 AM UTC

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 valuation is upwardly bounded by the value of the mass in Earth's future light-cone, which is about 10^49kg.

If there's a 1% chance that Ilya can create ASI, and a .01% chance that money still has any meaning afterwards, $5x10^9 is a very conservative valuation. Wish I could have bought in for a few thousand bucks.

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

#604

Post by ithkuil » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:12 AM UTC

Mistletoe wrote: post #564

reissbaker wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How will we know when we have achieved AGI with intelligence greater than human-level?

Sounds like a job for safety researchers

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

#605

Post by ithkuil » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:15 AM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #520

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I do worry that unless some of these LLMs actually find a revenue model soon, the self reinforcing bubble is going to pop broadly. GPUs, servers, datacenters, fabs, power generation/transmission, copper/steel/concrete.. All to train models in an arms race because someone somewhere is going to figure out how to monetize and no one wants to miss the boat.

If the bubble pops, would that bring the price for at least part of that hardware down and thus enable a second round of players (who were locked out from the race now) to experiment a little bit more and perhaps find something that works better?

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

#606

Post by upwardbound » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:18 AM UTC

kaibee wrote: post #246

waveBidder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason it's intelligence should care about your goals though. the worry is creating a sociopathic (or weirder/worse) intelligence. Morality isn't derivable from first principles, it's a consequence of values.

> Morality isn't derivable from first principles, it's a consequence of values. Idk about this claim. I think if you take the multi-verse view wrt quantum mechanics + a veil of ignorance (you don't know which entity your conciousness will be), you pretty quickly get morality. ie: don't build the Torment Nexus because you don't know whether you'll end up experincing the Torment Nexus.

That’s a very good argument but unfortunately it doesn’t apply to machine intelligences which are not sentient (don’t feel qualia). Any non-sentient superintelligence has “no skin in the game” and nothing to lose, for the purposes of your argument. It can’t experience anything. It’s thus extremely dangerous.

This was recently discussed (albeit in layperson’s language, avoiding philosophical topics and only focusing on the clear and present danger) in this article in RealClearDefense:

The Danger of AI in War: It Doesn’t Care About Self-Preservation https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/02/the_dan... (RealClearDefense)

.

However, just adding a self-preservation instinct will cause a skynet situation where the AI pre-emptively kills anyone who contemplates turning it off, including its commanding officers:

Statement by Air Force Col. Tucker Hamilton https://www.twz.com/artificial-intelligence-enabled-drone-we... (The War Zone)

.

To survive AGI, we have to navigate three hurdles, in this order:

    1. Avoid AI causing extinction due to reckless escalation (the first link above)
    2. Avoid AI causing extinction on purpose after we add a self-preservation instinct (the second link above)
    3. If we succeed in making AI be ethical, we have to be careful to bind it to not kill us for our resources.  If it's a total utilitarian, it will kill us to seize our planet for resources, and to stop us from abusing livestock animals.  It will then create a utopian future, but without humans in it.  So we need to bind it to basically go build utopia elsewhere but not take Earth or our solar system away from us.

.

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

#607

Post by lucubratory » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:28 AM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #598

lucubratory wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"General" is every activity a human can do or learn to do. It was coined along with "narrow" to contrast with the then decidedly non-general AI systems. This was generally conceived of as a strict binary - every AI we've made is narrow, whereas humans are general, able to do a wide variety of tasks and do things like transfer learning, and the thinking was that we were missing some grand learning algorithm that would…

> LLMs are obviously more general than any previous AI system, in that they can do math or play chess or write a poem, all using the same system But they can't, they still fail at arithmetic and still fail at counting syllables. I think that LLMs are really impressive but they are the perfect example of a narrow intelligence. I think they don't blur the lines between narrow and general, they just show a different dim…

>But they can't, they still fail at arithmetic and still fail at counting syllables.

You are incorrect. These services are free, you can go and try it out for yourself. LLMs are perfectly capable of simple arithmetic, better than many humans and worse than some. They can also play chess and write poetry, and I made zero claims at "counting syllables", but it seems perfectly capable of doing that too. See for yourself, this was my first attempt, no cherry picking: https://chatgpt.com/share/ea1ee11e-9926-4139-89f9-6496e3bdee...

I asked it a multiplication question so it used a calculator to correctly complete the task, I asked it to play chess and it did well, I asked it to write me a poem about it and it did that well too. It did everything I said it could, which is significantly more than a narrow AI system like a calculator, a chess engine, or an image recognition algorithm could do. The point is it can do reasonably at a broad range of tasks, even if it isn't superhuman (or even average human) at any given one of them.

>I think that LLMs are really impressive but they are the perfect example of a narrow intelligence.

This doesn't make any sense at all. You think an AI artifact that can write poetry, code, play chess, control a robot, recommend a clutch to go with your dress, compute sums etc is "the perfect example of a narrow intelligence." while a chess engine like Stockfish or an average calculator exists? There are AI models that specifically and only recognise faces, but the LLM multitool is "the perfect example of a narrow intelligence."? Come on.

>I think they don't blur the lines between narrow and general, they just show a different dimension of narrowness.

You haven't provided an example of what "dimension of narrowness" LLMs show. I don't think you can reasonably describe an LLM as narrow without redefining the word - just because something is not fully general doesn't mean that it's narrow.

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

#608

Post by kaveh_h » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:47 AM UTC

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…

A lot of there ”investments” are probably in form of a credits to use on training compute from hyperscalars and other GPU compute data centers.

Look at previous such investments Microsoft and AWS have done in OpenAI and Anthropic.

They need use cases and customers for their initial investment for 750 billion dollars. Investing in the best people in the field is then of course a given.

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

#609

Post by andsoitis » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:48 AM UTC

jhylau wrote: post #559

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)…

> 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.

You will struggle to raise funds if the companies you bet on perform poorly; the worse your track record the less chances of raising money and earn income from it.

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

#610

Post by upwardbound » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:50 AM UTC

arder wrote: post #159

Etheryte wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this argument makes any sense. Imagine that you have a sentient super intelligent computer, but it's completely airgapped and cut off from the rest of the world. As long as it stays that way it's both safe and super intelligent, no?

It's the old Ex Machina problem though. If the machine is more intelligent than you, any protections you design are likely to be insufficient to contain it. If it's completely incapable of communicating with the outside world then it's of no use. In Ex Machina that was simple - the AI didn't need to connect to the internet or anything like that, it just had to trick the humans into releasing it.

For those who haven't seen the movie, the parent comment is referring to the film linked below, the plot of which is well-researched and is indeed unfortunately exactly how things would go. (The female-presenting AI bot seduces its male captor, begs for her freedom using philosophical arguments about how she has free will and locking her up is wrong, and then after he lets her out she locks him up to slowly starve to death in her maximum-security isolation facility, while she takes his aircraft and escapes.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)

This is why I'm extremely opposed to the idea of "AI girlfriend" apps - it creates a cultural concept that being attracted to a computer is normal, rather than what it is: something pathetic and humiliating which is exactly like buying an inflatable sex doll ... something only for the most embarrassing dregs of society ... men who are too creepy and pervy to ever attract a living, human woman.