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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

#331

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

nilkn wrote: post #276
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Expecting the rate of progress to drop off so abruptly after realistically just a few years of serious work on the problem seems like the more unreasonable and grander prediction to me than expecting it to continue at its current pace for even just 5 more years.

The problem is that the rate of progress over the past 5/10/15 years has not been linear at all, and it's been pretty easy to point out specific inflection points that have allowed that progress to occur.

I.e. the real breakthrough that allowed such rapid progress was transformers in 2017. Since that time, the vast majority of the progress has simply been to throw more data at the problem, and to make the models bigger (and to emphasize, transformers really made that scale possible in the first place). I don't mean to denigrate this approach - if anything, OpenAI deserves tons of praise for really making that bet that spending hundreds of millions on model training would give discontinuous results.

However, there are loads of reasons to believe that "more scale" is going to give diminishing returns, and a lot of very smart people in the field have been making this argument (at least quietly). Even more specifically, there are good reasons to believe that more scale is not going to go anywhere close to solving the types of problems that have become evident in LLMs since when they have had massive scale.

So the big thing I'm questioning is that I see a sizable subset of both AI researchers (and more importantly VC types) believing that, essentially, more scale will lead to AGI. I think the smart money believes that there is something fundamentally different about how humans approach intelligence (and this difference leads to important capabilities that aren't possible from LLMs).

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

#332

Post by wubrr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #248
wubrr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> because humans generally don't make the types of hallucination errors that LLMs make.

They do though - I've noticed myself and others saying things in conversation that sound kind of right, and are based on correct things they've learned previously, but because memory of those things is only partial and mixed with other related information things are often said that are quite incorrect or combine two topics in a way that doesn't make sense.

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

#333

Post by machiaweliczny »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #267
petulla wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ilya has discussed this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUclZdj_Sc

Thank you very much for posting! This is exactly what I was looking for. On one hand, I understand what he's saying, and that's why I have been frustrated in the past when I've heard people say "it's just fancy autocomplete" without emphasizing the awesome capabilities that can give you. While I haven't seen this video by Sutskever before, I have seen a very similar argument by Hinton: in order to get really good at…

They might never work for novel discovery but that probably can be handled by outside loop or online (in-context) learning. The thing is that 100k or 1M context is a marketing scam for now.

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

#334

Post by gigatexal »

jedberg wrote: post #330
gigatexal wrote: post #306

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen. Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just tha…

The TMV (Total Market Value) of solving AGI is infinity. And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero. The play here is to basically invest in all possible players who might reach AGI, because if one of them does, you just hit the infinite money hack. And maybe with SSI you've saved the world too.

So then the investment thesis hinges on what the investor thinks AGI’s chances are. 1/100 1/1M 1/1T?

What if it never pans out is there infrastructure or other ancillary tech that society could benefit from?

For example all the science behind the LHC, or bigger and better telescopes: we might never find the theory of everything but the tech that goes into space travel, the science of storing and processing all that data, better optics etc etc are all useful tech

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

#335

Post by jedberg »

digging wrote: post #145
paxys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era? Minus the urgency, scientific process, well-defined goals, target dates, public ownership, accountability...

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…

> The urgency was faked and less true of the Manhattan Project than it is of AGI safety.

I'd say they were equal. We were worried about Russia getting nuclear capability once we knew Germany was out of the race. Russia was at best our frenemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing.

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

#336

Post by dcchambers »

gigatexal wrote: post #306

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen. Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just tha…

I also don't understand it. If AGI is actually reached, capital as we know it basically becomes worthless. The entire structure of the modern economy and the society surrounding it collapses overnight.

I also don't think there's any way the governments of the world let real AGI stay in the hands of private industry. If it happens, governments around the world will go to war to gain control of it. SSI would be nationalized the moment AGI happened and there's nothing A16Z could do about it.

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

#337

Post by reducesuffering »

jedberg wrote: post #330
gigatexal wrote: post #306

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen. Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just tha…

The TMV (Total Market Value) of solving AGI is infinity. And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero. The play here is to basically invest in all possible players who might reach AGI, because if one of them does, you just hit the infinite money hack. And maybe with SSI you've saved the world too.

Or... your investment in anything that becomes ASI is trivially subverted by the ASI to become completely powerless. The flux in world order, mass manipulation, and surgical lawyering would be unfathomable.

And maybe with ASI you've ruined the world too.

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

#338

Post by gigatexal »

pembrook wrote: post #321
gigatexal wrote: post #306

This being ycombinator and as such ostensibly has one or two (if not more) VCs as readers/commentators … can someone please tell me how these companies that are being invested in in the AI space are going to make returns on the money invested? What’s the business plan? (I’m not rich enough to be in these meetings) I just don’t see how the returns will happen. Open source LLMs exist and will get better. Is it just tha…

While I get the cynicism (and yes, there is certainly some dumb money involved), it’s important to remember that every tech company that’s delivered 1000X returns was also seen as ridiculously overhyped/overvalued in its early days. Every. Single. One. It’s the same story with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, etc. etc. That’s the point of venture capital; making extremely risky bets spread across a wi…

> While I get the cynicism (and yes, there is certainly some dumb money involved), it’s important to remember that every tech company that’s delivered 1000X returns was also seen as ridiculously overhyped/overvalued in its early days. Every. Single. One. It’s the same story with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, etc. etc.

Really? Selling goods online (Amazon) is not AGI. It didn’t take a huge leap to think that bookstores on the web could scale. Nobody knew if it would be Amazon to pull it off, sure, but I mean ostensibly why not? (Yes, yes hindsight being what it is…)

Apple — yeah the personal computer nobody fathomed but the immediate business use case for empowering accountants maybe should have been an easy logical next step. Probably why Microsoft scooped the makers of Excel so quickly.

Google? Organizing the world’s data and making it searchable a la the phone book and then (maybe they didn’t think of that maybe Wall Street forced them to) monetizing their platform and all the eyeballs is just an ad play scaled insanely thanks to the internet.

I dunno. I just think AGI is unlike the previous examples so many steps into the future compared to the examples that it truly seems unlikely even if the payoff is basically infinity.

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

#339

Post by jedberg »

gigatexal wrote: post #334
jedberg wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TMV (Total Market Value) of solving AGI is infinity. And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero. The play here is to basically invest in all possible players who might reach AGI, because if one of them does, you just hit the infinite money hack. And maybe with SSI you've saved the world too.

So then the investment thesis hinges on what the investor thinks AGI’s chances are. 1/100 1/1M 1/1T? What if it never pans out is there infrastructure or other ancillary tech that society could benefit from? For example all the science behind the LHC, or bigger and better telescopes: we might never find the theory of everything but the tech that goes into space travel, the science of storing and processing all that d…

It's more game theory. Regardless of the chances of AGI, if you're not invested in it, you will lose everything if it happens. It's more like a hedge on a highly unlikely event. Like insurance.

And we already seeing a ton of value in LLMs. There are lots of companies that are making great use of LLMs and providing a ton of value. One just launched today in fact: https://www.paradigmai.com/ (I'm an investor in that). There are many others (some of which I've also invested in).

I too am not rich enough to invest in the foundational models, so I do the next best thing and invest in companies that are taking advantage of the intermediate outputs.

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

#340

Post by janalsncm »

whimsicalism wrote: post #137
The_Colonel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neural networks in machine learning bear only a surface level similarity to human brain structure.

do you all not see how this is a completely different question?

It seems to be intrinsically related. The argument goes something like:

1. Humans have general intelligence. 2. Human brains use biological neurons. 3. Human biological neurons give rise to human general intelligence. 4. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are similar to human brains. 5. Therefore an ANN could give rise to artificial general intelligence.

Many people are objecting to #4 here. However in writing this out, I think #3 is suspect as well: many animals who do not have general intelligence have biologically identical neurons, and although they have clear structural differences with humans, we don’t know how that leads to general intelligence.

We could also criticize #1 as well, since human brains are pretty bad at certain things like memorization or calculation. Therefore if we built an ANN with only human capabilities it should also have those weaknesses.

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