$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.
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Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#242Again I read the comments and can't think of any place less optimistic or understanding of technology than Hackernews. Lot's of armchair critics thinking they know better than the guy who help built AlexNet. I should be surprised but I'm not anymore, just disapointed. One of the smartest computer science researchers is taking a stab at the most important problem of our lifetimes, we should be cheering him on.
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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one had built a nuclear bomb before the Manhattan project either.
this is not evidence in favor of your position. We could use this to argue in favor of anything such as “humans will eventually develop time travel” or “we will have cost effective fusion power”. The fact is many things we’ve tried to develop for decades still don’t exist. Nothing is guaranteed
I'd put decent odds on a $1B research project developing time travel if time travel were an ability that every human child was innately born with. It's never easy to recreate what biology has done, but nature providing an "existence proof" goes a long way towards removing doubt about it being fundamentally possible.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#244Lots 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’…
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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#245Lots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in…
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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#246Safe superintelligence is a misnomer. If it’s intelligent, it knows what must be done. If it can’t, it’s not super or intelligent.
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.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#247Funny how the "Open" in OpenAI disappeared pretty quickly. I bet the "Safe" in "Safe Superintelligence" will follow a similar path
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Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#248Lots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in…
> the more that it becomes clear that LLMs really are just "fancy autocomplete", even if it's really really fancy autocomplete I also don't really see AGI emerging from LLMs any time soon, but it could be argued that human intelligence is also just 'fancy autocomplete'.
> but it could be argued that human intelligence is also just 'fancy autocomplete'.
But that's my point - in some ways it's obvious that humans are not just doing "fancy autocomplete" because humans generally don't make the types of hallucination errors that LLMs make. That is, the hallucination errors do make sense if you think of how an LLM is just a statistical relationship between tokens.
One thing to emphasize, I'm not saying the "understanding" that humans seem to possess isn't just some lower level statistical process - I'm not "invoking a soul". But I am saying it appears to be fundamentally different, and in many cases more useful, than what an LLM can do.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#249We don't even understand how the brain functions completely, not even close. Until we have a complete understanding of how our own GI works down to the exact bio-mechanical level, we can't achieve AGI. That's the theoretical basis and path for achieving AGI (if it's even possible). I'm tired of all the "we stick enough data in the magic black box blender and ta-da! AGI!" Every giant technological break-through throug…
I'm drawing a blank on the paper and can't find it casually Googling, but there are fairly well understood mathematical models for how neurotransmitters cause neurons to fire or not fire. It is just probabilities when you zoom out enough. One paper modeled part of a rat brain, visual cortex I think, using this by basically coding up some simulated neurons and neurotransmitters, then turned it on. They were able to get the program and the live rat brain to display similar patterns when showing them various images.
I feel like this could be a path to GI without "truly" understanding the human brain: make a large enough simulation of the brain and turn it on. I actually do think we understand enough about the nuts and bolts of neuron interaction to achieve this. What we don't understand is where neurons firing turns into consciousness. It seems like it is probably just an emergent property of a complex enough neuron graph.
Re: Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
#250Lots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in…
The argument about AGI from LLMs is not based on the current state of LLMs, but on the rate of progress over the last 5+ years or so. It wasn't very long ago that almost nobody outside of a few niche circles seriously thought LLMs could do what they do right now. That said, my personal hypothesis is that AGI will emerge from video generation models rather than text generation models. A model that takes an arbitrary r…
> The argument about AGI from LLMs is not based on the current state of LLMs, but on the rate of progress over the last 5+ years or so.
And what I'm saying is that I find that argument to be incredibly weak. I've seen it time and time again, and honestly at this point just feels like a "humans should be a hundred feet tall based on on their rate of change in their early years" argument.
While I've also been amazed at the past progress in LLMs, I don't see any reason to expect that rate will continue in the future. What I do see the more and more I use the SOTA models is fundamental limitations in what LLMs are capable of.