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Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B

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

#721
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Track record is based on IRR mostly. See my other comment on the Lps below regarding the incentive structure and what they care about. This particular bet is almost a guaranteed markup, as Ilya will surely/likely raise another round. It’s also not a terrible bet to invest in a proven expert/founder. By the time these companies exit (if they ever) 15 years from now, the mega fund VC partner will probably be retired fr…

> 15 years from now, the mega fund VC partner will probably be retired

So all the successful VC partners from 2010 are close to retirement or have retired?

Why say something testable if it is obviously wrong.

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

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's all just fleecing money from mega corps? (Cue the "Always has been" meme?)

No, sometimes it's about an IPO. In which case, if we're being cynical, the exit is funded by your 401k. But yeah, VCs generally aren't about building profitable companies, because there's more profit to be made - and sooner - if you bootstrap and sell.

Are you suggesting VCs "bootstrap" to IPO? Can you help me understand if bootstrsp is commonly used in the sense you are using?

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

#723
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Asserting that there is strong evidence against a claim is not "debunking" a claim.

You're right, that was overstated. I should have just said addressed. But my word choice doesn't make the gp comment any more valid.

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

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting attributes to mention... The urgency was faked and less true of the Manhattan Project than it is of AGI safety. 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, saying it was unnecessary and dangerous. However, the race to develop AGI is very real, and we also have no way of knowing how close anyone is t…

> However, the race to develop AGI is very real, and we also have no way of knowing how close anyone is to reaching it. It seems pretty irresponsible for AI boosters to say it’ll happen within 5 years then. There’s a pretty important engineering distinction between the Manhattan Project and current research towards AGI. At the time of the Manhattan Project scientists already had a pretty good idea of how to build the…

> It seems pretty irresponsible for AI boosters to say it’ll happen within 5 years then.

Agreed. Do they?

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

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it turns out that to ‘just learn’ the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text This is pretty sloppy thinking. The neural network learns some representation of a process that COULD HAVE produced the text. (this isn't some bold assertion, it's just the literal definition of a statistical model). The…

It's not sloppy. It just doesn't matter in the limit of training. 1. An Octopus and a Raven have wildly different brains. Both are intelligent. So just the idea that there is some "one true system" that the NN must discover or converge on is suspect. Even basic arithmetic has numerous methods. 2. In the limit of training on a diverse dataset (ie as val loss continues to go down), it will converge on the process (what…

> whether that looks like how humans do it or not.

So you agree with me that there is no guarantee it learns any representation of the actual process that produced the training data.

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

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it turns out that to ‘just learn’ the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text This is pretty sloppy thinking. The neural network learns some representation of a process that COULD HAVE produced the text. (this isn't some bold assertion, it's just the literal definition of a statistical model). The…

A photograph is not the same as its subject, and it is not sufficient to reconstruct the subject, but it's still a representation of the subject. Even a few sketched lines are something we recognise as a representation of a physical object. I think it's fair to call one process that can imitate a more complex one a representation of that process. Especially when in the very next sentence he describes it as a "project…

> I think it's fair to call one process that can imitate a more complex one a representation of that process

I think it's sloppy.

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

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it turns out that to ‘just learn’ the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text This is pretty sloppy thinking. The neural network learns some representation of a process that COULD HAVE produced the text. (this isn't some bold assertion, it's just the literal definition of a statistical model). The…

It's not sloppy. It just doesn't matter in the limit of training. 1. An Octopus and a Raven have wildly different brains. Both are intelligent. So just the idea that there is some "one true system" that the NN must discover or converge on is suspect. Even basic arithmetic has numerous methods. 2. In the limit of training on a diverse dataset (ie as val loss continues to go down), it will converge on the process (what…

> In the limit of training on a diverse dataset (ie as val loss continues to go down), it will converge on the process (whatever that means) or a process sufficiently robust.

This is just moving the goal posts from "learning the actual process" to "any process sufficiently robust"

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

#729
post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor will never become worthless until you have physical robots with AGI and the dexterity to do what an average human can.

How many months is that moat going to hold? More than 12, probably. More than 120? I doubt it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrLuUxv9gE

Probably 10 years once we get to AGI but we are not there and there is no guarantee we will get there.

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

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the internet is worth trillions now.

The Internet is worth trillions to no one in particular. Just as clean water is worth trillions to no one in particular. Or the air we breathe. You can take an abstract, general category and use it to infer that some specific business will benefit greatly, but in practice, the greater the opportunity the less likely it is it will be monopolized, and the more likely it is it will be commoditized. But, my comment was a…

It’s worth trillions to all the trillion dollar tech companies and their millions of employees and shareholders. What do you mean no one in particular.
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