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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

#461

Post by astrange »

koolala wrote: post #162

Doesn't this corrupt SafeAI's safe vision just like $1,000,000,000 corrupted OpenAI's open vision? How can investment like this not transform a company's mission into eventually paying back Billions and making Billions of dollars?

Well that's easy, you just don't pay it back.

It helps if you think of the investors as customers and the business model as making them think they're cool. Same model Uber used for self driving car research.

SSI Inc should probably be a public benefit company if they're going to talk like that though.

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

#462

Post by edgyquant »

romeros wrote: post #457
snowwrestler wrote: post #445

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. I feel like these extreme numbers are a pretty obvious clue that we’re talking about something that is completely imaginary. Like I could put “perpetual motion machine” into those sentences and the same logic holds.

The intuition is pretty spot on though. We don't need to get to AGI. Just making progress along the way to AGI can do plenty of damage. 1. AI-driven medical procedures: Healthcare Cost = $0. 2. Access to world class education: Cost of education = $0 3. Transportation: Cheap Autonomous vehicles powered by Solar. 4. Scientific research: AI will accelerate scientific progress by coming up with novel hypotheses and then…

Why would health care cost go to zero just because it’s automated? There are still costs involved

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

#463

Post by astrange »

Maxatar wrote: post #173
bluecalm wrote: post #157

Considering that Sam Bankman-Fried raised more money at higher multiplier for a company to trade magic tokens and grand ideas such as that maybe one day you will be able to buy a banana with them I don't think Ilya impressed the investors too much. On a serious note I would love to bet on him at this valuation. I think many others would as well. I guess if he wanted more money he would easily get it but probably he v…

FTX was incredibly profitable, and their main competitor Binance is today a money printing machine. FTX failed because of fraud and embezzlement, not because their core business was failing.

FTX itself was profitable, but that's because Alameda Research was selling dollars for 80 cents, and all the other traders were paying FTX fees to rip off Alameda. Unfortunately, Alameda was running on FTX customer money.

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

#464

Post by edgyquant »

astrange wrote: post #451
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.

> And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero. This isn't true for the reason economics is called "the dismal science". A slaveowner called it that because the economists said slavery was inefficient and he got mad at them. In this case, you're claiming an AGI would make everything free because it will gather all resources and do all work for you for free. And a human level…

Only if it’s a sentient being, in reality we’re just going to get smarter tools. That still doesn’t make things free but it could make them cheaper.

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

#465

Post by kelnos »

steveBK123 wrote: post #440
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…

How is this any different than the (lack of) business model of all the voice assistants? How good does it have to be, how many features does it have to have, how accurate does its need to be.. in order for people to pay anything? And how much are people actually willing to spend against the $XX Billion of investment? Again it just seems like "sell to AAPL/GOOG/MSFT and let them figure it out".

> How is this any different than the (lack of) business model of all the voice assistants?

Feels very different to me. The dominant ones are run by Google, Apple, and Amazon, and the voice assistants are mostly add-on features that don't by themselves generate much (if any) revenue (well, aside from the news that Amazon wants to start charging for a more advanced Alexa). The business model there is more like "we need this to drive people to our other products where they will spend money; if we don't others will do it for their products and we'll fall behind".

Sure, these companies are also working on AI, but there are also a bunch of others (OpenAI, Anthropic, SSI, xAI, etc.) that are banking on AI as their actual flagship product that people and businesses will pay them to use.

Meanwhile we have "indie" voice assistants like Mycroft that fail to find a sustainable business model and/or fail to gain traction and end up shutting down, at least as a business.

I'm not sure where this is going, though. Sure, some of these AI companies will get snapped up by bigger corps. I really hope, though, that there's room for sustainable, independent businesses. I don't want Google or Apple or Amazon or Microsoft to "own" AI.

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

#466

Post by edgyquant »

lo0dot0 wrote: post #430
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.

TMV can not be infinity because human wants and needs are not infinite.

A fundamental statement in economics is that humans do actually have infinite wants in a universe with finite resources. This creates scarcity

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

#467

Post by doe_eyes »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #435
kimbler wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These VC’s are already lining up the exit as they are investing. They all sit on the boards of major corps and grease the acquisitions all the way through. The hit rate of the top funds is all about connections and enablement.

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.

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

#468

Post by astrange »

upwardbound wrote: post #140
avocardio wrote: post #58

I don't understand how "safe" AI can raise that much money. If anything, they will have to spend double the time on red-teaming before releasing anything commercially. "Unsafe" AI seems much more profitable.

Unsafe AI would cause human extinction which is bad for shareholders because shareholders are human persons and/or corporations beneficially owned by humans. Related to this, DAO's (decentralized autonomous organizations which do not have human shareholders) are intrinsically dangerous, because they can benefit their fiduciary duty even if it involves causing all humans to die. E.g., if the machine faction in The Mat…

There's no legal structure that has that level of fiduciary duty to anything. Corporations don't even really have fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and no CEO thinks they do.

https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...

The idea behind "corporations should only focus on returns to shareholders" is that if you let them do anything else, CEOs will just set whatever targets they want, and it makes it harder to judge if they're doing the right thing or if they're even good at it. It's basically reducing corporate power in that sense.

> E.g., if the machine faction in The Matrix were to exist within the framework of US laws, it would probably be a DAO.

That'd have to be a corporation with a human lawyer as the owner or something. No such legal concept as a DAO that I'm aware of.

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

#469

Post by edgyquant »

tim333 wrote: post #356
jedberg wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

If you want safe investment you could always buy land. AGI won't be able to make more of that.

As humans move into space this statement becomes less true

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

#470

Post by astrange »

edgyquant wrote: post #464
astrange wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And furthermore, if AGI is solved, the TMV of pretty much everything else drops to zero. This isn't true for the reason economics is called "the dismal science". A slaveowner called it that because the economists said slavery was inefficient and he got mad at them. In this case, you're claiming an AGI would make everything free because it will gather all resources and do all work for you for free. And a human level…

Only if it’s a sentient being, in reality we’re just going to get smarter tools. That still doesn’t make things free but it could make them cheaper.

Then it's not an AGI. If you can use the word "just", that seems to make it not "general".

> That still doesn’t make things free but it could make them cheaper.

That would increase demand for it, which would also increase demand for its inputs and outputs, potentially making those more expensive. (eg AGI powered manufacturing robots still need raw materials)

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