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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

#641

Post by robertlagrant »

trashtester wrote: post #639
gizajob wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My guess is that whoever develops superintelligence first will not release it to the public, but rather use it for their own purposes to gain an edge. They may still release AI products to the public that are good enough and cheap enough to prevent competitors from being profitable or receive funding (to prevent them from catching up), but that's not where the value would come from. Just as an example, let's say xAI…

> whoever develops superintelligence first will not release it to the public, but rather use it for their own purposes to gain an edge

We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. There's no "first". There's only "remote possibility".

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

#642

Post by robertlagrant »

__loam wrote: post #618
gizajob wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

> Nvidia making massive profits is a sign of huge market inefficiency and potential opportunities for competition.

Yep, but just as the first reading glasses were only available to the wealthy, and now anyone can have them, the inefficiency takes time to work out. It'll take a long time, especially given how vertically integrated Nvidia are.

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

#644

Post by troupo »

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?

No. It's the next Magic Leap of our era. Or the next Juicero of our era. Or the next any of the hundreds of unprofitable startups losing billions of dollars a year without any business plan beyond VC subsidies and a hope for an exit of our era.

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

#645

Post by baq »

trashtester wrote: post #638
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? "vectorized linear algebra" is at the root of most of modern Physics. Specifically, the laws of Physics are represented by the Lie groups U(1), SU(2), SU(3) and SO(3,1). While the manifolds that Physics act on are curved, they're "locally flat". That is why local operations are tensor operations. Or linear…

> AI fundamentally comes with the potential to do anything a human can do in the economy (provided robotic tech keeps up). If so, the word "productivity" as currently used (economic value produced per hour of human work) becomes meaningless, since it would go to infinite (because of division by zero).

time for a Culture re-read I guess.

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

#646

Post by baq »

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.

Given how many folks blow up and go back into the business... the best way to get a fund to run is to have previous experience running a fund.

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

#647

Post by spacebanana7 »

slashdave wrote: post #577
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…

> It could cure every disease humanity has ever known No amount of intelligence can do this without the experimental data to back it up.

Practically this is true, but I do love the idea of solving diseases from first principles.

Making new mathematics that creates new physics/chemistry which can get us new biology. It’d be nice to make progress without the messiness of real world experiments.

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

#648

Post by KingMob »

mattfrommars wrote: post #573
ignoramous wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Israel is a leading AI and software development hub... Yep, and if any place will produce the safest AI ever, its got to be there.

Safest place for AI? Their miltary has the worse track and a complete fascist state. Israel is the worst place to fund "safe and humane AI" Israeli military operations continues to this day with over 41,000 civilians killed.

Pretty sure they're being sarcastic.

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

#649

Post by skibz »

whiplash451 wrote: post #362

Ilya is basically building the Tandem Computers of AI. Before Tandem, computers used to fail regularly. Tandem changed that forever (with a massive reward for their investors). Similarly, LLMs are known to fail regularly. Until someone figures out a way for them not to hallucinate anymore. Which is exactly what Ilya is after.

That was the hardest nerd snipe I've suffered in quite some time.

Thank you for teaching me about Tandem Computers!

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

#650

Post by openrisk »

trashtester wrote: post #638
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? "vectorized linear algebra" is at the root of most of modern Physics. Specifically, the laws of Physics are represented by the Lie groups U(1), SU(2), SU(3) and SO(3,1). While the manifolds that Physics act on are curved, they're "locally flat". That is why local operations are tensor operations. Or linear…

> "vectorized linear algebra" is at the root of most of modern Physics.

the "vectorized" adjective was meant to imply implementing linear algebra in digital computers that can operate concurrently on large-dimensional vectors/tensors. In this sense (and despite Wolfram's diligence and dearest wishes) modern physics theories have exactly 0% digital underpinning :-)

> It's not all that surprising to me that "intelligence" is represented by similar math.

yes, the state of the art of our modeling ability in pretty much any domain is to conceive of a non-linear system description and "solve it" by linearization. Me thinks this is primary reason we haven't really cracked "complexity": We can only solve the problems we have the proverbial hammer to apply to.

> AI fundamentally comes with the potential to do anything a human can do

That goes into wild speculation territory. In any case the economy is always about organizing human relationships. Technology artifacts only change the decor, not the substance of our social relations. Unless we completely cease to have dependencies on each other (what a dystopic world!) there will always be the question of an individual's ability to provide others with something of value.

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