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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

#681

Post by trashtester »

ulfw wrote: post #571

Startups used to be started on a few thousand, few hundred thousand of 'friends and family' seed capital. Maybe an angel here or there. That's a startup. Not folks getting a BILLION dollars having no product and just ten people. Sorry but this is just so overhyped and sad. This is not the valley I came to live in back in the 90s and 2000s

Ilya has a track record like nobody else in the business.

He was part of most breakthroughs from Alexnet to GPT-4. He's also rumored to be extraordinarily brilliant.

In a world where 100s of billions are dumped into this type of technology, a single billion to him is not unreasonable for anyone hedging their bets.

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

#682

Post by trashtester »

stephenitis wrote: post #558
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.

An alternative way of seeing it, is that Ilya may be the only one people trust to actually aim for safe ASI.

If someone thinks that the only way to avoid extinction is if SSI wins the race, they may want to infest.

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

#683

Post by robertlagrant »

trashtester wrote: post #664
robertlagrant wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. Fundamentally, we have no evidence of anything that will happen in the future. All we do is to extrapolate from the past through the present, typically using some kind of theory of how the world operates. The belief that we will eventually (whether it's this year or in 1000+ years), really only hinges on the following 3 assumptions: 1) The human brain is…

> Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices.

This is your weak link. I don't see why progress will be a straight line and not a sloping-off curve. You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light.

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

#684

Post by trashtester »

yashap wrote: post #182
gary_0 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

The successful companies that came out of the dot com bubble era actually proved their business viability before getting major investment, though. Amazon is one of the most famous successes of the era. Bezos quit his job, launched the business out of his garage, with seed money being $10K of his own savings, and was doing $20K/week in sales just 30 days later. And I believe their only VC round before going public was…

This wave, whether or not it's a bubble, has very little in common with the dotcom era. It's simply a bad analogy.

The dotcom era was full of unprofitable startups pumping up the stock price in all sorts of ways, as they were completely dependent on continues capital flows from investors to stay afloat. Also, a lot of that capital came from retail investors in various forms.

The AI wave that is currently ongoing is for the most part funded by some of the largest and most profitable corporations on the planet.

Companies like Alphabet, Meta, Tesla/X, Amazon and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft still have founders that either control or provide a direction for these companies.

What drives this way is the fact that most of these founders have a strong belief.

We know, for instance, that Larry Page and Elon Musk had a disagreement about the future role of AGI/ASI about 15 years ago, leading to Elon Musk helping to found OpenAI to make sure that Google would not gain a monopoly.

These are strong convictions held by very powerful people that have been held for decades. Short term stock market fluctuations are not going to suddenly collapse this "bubble".

As long as these founders continue to believe that AGI is close, they will continue to push, even if the stock market stops it support to the push.

SSI may fail, of course. But Ilya has a rumor of (from people like Hinton and Elon) as being perhaps the greatest and most capable visionary in the business.

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

#685

Post by trashtester »

_fat_santa wrote: post #98
kklisura wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally blind on this, hoping for someone to shed some light: do these investors get some pitch, information or some roadmap of what company intends to create, how will it earn revenue, how will it spend money or how will it operate?

I heard this on a reddit thread a while back but rings very true here. > If you are seeking capital for a startup with a product, you have to sell the startup on realities (ie how much revenue you are making). If you are seeking capital for a startup with no product, you can sell the startup on dreams, which is much much easier but also way riskier for investors. Since these guys don't have a product yet, they 100% s…

> combined with Ilya's track record at OpenAI.

I think it's Ilya's track record all the way since AlexNet, including his time at Google AND OpenAI.

He's not a one-trick-pony.

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

#686

Post by trashtester »

oezi wrote: post #75
paxys wrote: post #13

$1B raise, $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple months old and doesn't have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild.

Add another 500m to NVDA's quarterly profits?

NVDA's profits at the moment is limited by TSMC production capacity, not what they're able to sell....

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

#687

Post by darkwater »

idiocrat wrote: post #521
furyofantares wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a VC so maybe you don't care what I think, I'm not sure. Last night as my 8yo was listening to childrens audio books going to sleep, she asked me to have it alternate book A then B then A then B. I thought, idunno maybe I can work out a way to do this. Maybe the app has playlists and maaaaaaaaaaybe has a way to set a playlist on repeat. Or maybe you just can't do this in the app at all. I just sat there and s…

Talking to an electronic assistant is so antiquated. It feels unnatural to formulate inner thoughts into verbal commands. An ubiquitous phone has enough sensors/resources to be fully situationally aware and preempt/predict for each holder any action long time ahead. It can measure the pulse, body postures and movements, gestures, breath patterns, calculate mood, listen to the surrounding sounds, recall all informatio…

> The personal assistant will feel that you are probably interested in your daughters sleep and give you an exact objective medical analysis of the quality of the sleep of your daughter tonight, without you needing to ask the personal assistant of your daughter.

Next step: the assistant knows that your brain didn't react to much to its sleep report the last 5 mornings, so it will stop bothering you altogether. And maybe chitchat with your daughter's assistant to let her know that her father has no interest in her health. Cool, no? (I bet there is already some science fiction on this topic?)

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

#688

Post by sadtoot »

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…

My guess is that whoever develops superintelligence first will have a big number in their bank account while their body is disassembled to make solar panels and data centers

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

#689

Post by trashtester »

EGreg wrote: post #329
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people weren’t handed that success. You are acting as if they were born billionaires, which is far from true. It’s not personally my goal to amass immense wealth and start giant companies (I would rather work minimally and live hedonically) but I am impressed by those that do so.

No, I’m saying it was those who went to silicon valley and got lucky to strike up relationships with CAPITAL who made it. Overwhelmingly talent isnt sufficient. For most startups, the old boys network gets to choose who gets millions. And the next rounds a few people choose who will get billions.

If you look at the early stages of Google or Zip2, they were NOT swimming in money. Facebook only attracted serious investments when they already had something that looked promising. Apple started in a bedroom in the parent's house, before being moved to the garage, and so on.

If anything, I think startups from 2005-2020 were more likely to get founding easily than those giants.

But after succeeding, in some cases several times, all of the above found it easier to find investors.

Ilya has a similar track record. He contributed on several breakthroughs such as AlexNet, AlphaGo, seq2seq (that would evolve into transformers after he left Google) before even joining OpenAI.

In fact, Elon see it as one of his key contributions to OpenAI that he managed to recruit Ilya.

That Ilya is able to raise 1B now is hardly surprising. He's probably able to raise way more than that once he's hired a larger team.

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

#690

Post by trashtester »

elAhmo wrote: post #187
sirspacey wrote: post #85

Lots of dismissive comments here. Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had. He’s raised enough to compete at the level of Grok, Claude, et al. He’s offering investors a pure play AGI investment, possibly one of the only organizations available to do so. Who else would you give $1B to pursue that? That’…

Even with Ilya demonstrating his capabilities in those areas you mentioned, it seems like investors are simply betting on his track record, hoping he’ll replicate the success of OpenAI. This doesn’t appear to be an investment in solving a specific problem with a clear product-market fit, which is why the reception feels dismissive.

When Ilya was in Toronto, the breakthroughs came from Toronto.

When Ilya was in Google, the breakthroughs came from Google.

When Ilya was in OpenAI, the breakthroughs came from OpenAI.

....

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