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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

#611

Post by openrisk »

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation?

There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized.

This is not a trivial feat.

In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolated, CISC, deterministic desktops giving way not to "AGI", but widely available, networked, vector "supercomputers" that can digest and transform practically everything that has ever been digitized.

Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be.

In an ideal world there should be no winner-takes-all entity but a broad-based leveling up, i.e., spreading these new means of production as widely as possible.

Heck, maybe we will even eventually see the famously absent productivity gains from digital tech?

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

#612

Post by reissbaker »

kvee wrote: post #534
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…

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

That may be true, but even if it is, that doesn't mean human-level capability is unachievable: only that alignment is easier.

If you could get expert-human-level capability with, say, 64xH100s for inference on a single model (for comparison, llama-3.1-405b can be run on 8xH100s with minimal quality degradation at FP8), even at a mere 5 tok/s you'd be able to spin up new research and engineering teams for That being said, it might not be achievable! SSI only wins if:

1. It's achievable, and

2. They get there first.

(Well, and the theoretical cap on intelligence has to be significantly higher than human intelligence — if you can get a little past Einstein, but no further, the iterative self-improvement will quickly stop working, open-source will get there too, and it'll eat your profit margins. But I suspect the cap on intelligence is pretty high.)

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

#613

Post by gizajob »

openrisk wrote: post #611

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized. This is not a trivial feat. In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolat…

“Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be”

Nvidia

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

#614

Post by cedws »

typon wrote: post #71

Anyone know John Carmack's status on his AGI company?

Guess it didn’t go anywhere. Carmack is smart but how much work does he actually do on the front lines these days? Can he really just walk into unfamiliar territory and expect to move the needle?

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

#615

Post by lobochrome »

openrisk wrote: post #611

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized. This is not a trivial feat. In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolat…

This is a fantastic comment. Very insightful.

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

#616

Post by openrisk »

gizajob wrote: post #613
openrisk wrote: post #611

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized. This is not a trivial feat. In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolat…

“Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be” Nvidia

They are now, but will they be winning in 10 (or even 3-5) years?

Their shtick is a GPU on steroids. In the bigger picture its a well positioned hack that has ridden two successive speculative bubbles (crypto mining and AI) but its unclear how far this can go. Currently this approach is wildly successful cause nobody else bothered to toil a serious vision about the post-Moore's law era. But make no mistake, people's minds will get focused.

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

#618

Post by __loam »

gizajob wrote: post #613
openrisk wrote: post #611

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized. This is not a trivial feat. In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolat…

“Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be” Nvidia

Maybe I'm naive but there seems to be way too much financial incentive in this space for CUDA to continue to be the top dog. Just like microprocessors, these devices are going to get commodified, standardized, open sourced, etc. Nvidia making massive profits is a sign of huge market inefficiency and potential opportunities for competition.

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

#619

Post by __loam »

digging wrote: post #365
subsubzero wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and also disagree. > There was no nuclear weapons race; once it became clear that Germany had no chance of building atomic bombs, several scientists left the MP in protest You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a…

Did you stop reading my comment there? I debunked this already.

You did not lol

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

#620

Post by pennaMan »

openrisk wrote: post #611

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized. This is not a trivial feat. In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolat…

>Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation?

Wait till you hear that a bunch of meat[1] is behind all said speculation.

[1]https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thi...

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