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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

#511

Post by damanoman »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #313
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…

If Ilya is sincere in his belief about safe superintelligence being within reach in a decade or so, and the investors sincerely believe this as well, then the business plan is presumably to deploy the superintelligence in every field imaginable. "SSI" in pharmaceuticals alone would be worth the investment. It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation. I'm…

Let’s be real. Having worked at $tech companies, I’m cynical and believe that AGI will basically be used for improving adtech and executing marketing campaigns.

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

#512

Post by p1esk »

alexilliamson wrote: post #448
jedberg wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true super intelligence would need the ability to evolve, and would probably evolve its own wants and needs.

It would still need an objective to guide the evolution that was originally given by humans. Humans have the drive for survival and reproduction... what about AGI? How do we go from a really good algorithm to an independently motivated, autonomous super intelligence with free reign in the physical world? Perhaps we should worry once we have robot heads of state and robot CEOs. Something tells me the current, human he…

Someone will surely set its objective for survival and evolution.

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

#513

Post by null_shift »

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.

And once AGI occurs, will the value of the original investment even matter?

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

#514

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#515

Post by janalsncm »

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…

> 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 weapon. The fundamental research had already been done. Most of the budget was actually just spent refining uranium. Of course there were details to figure out like the specific design of the detonator, but the mechanism of a runaway chain reaction was understood. This is much more concrete than building AGI.

For AGI nobody knows how to do it in detail. There are proposals for building trillion dollar clusters but we don’t have any theoretical basis for believing we’ll get AGI afterwards. The “scaling laws” people talk about are not actual laws but just empirical observations of trends in flawed metrics.

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

#517

Post by steveBK123 »

damanoman wrote: post #510
kelnos wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that follows. Prices are set by market forces, not by cost (though cost is usually a hard floor). Waymo rides cost within a few tens of cents of Uber and Lyft rides. Waymo doesn't have to pay a driver, so what's the deal? It costs a lot to build those cars and build the software to run them. But also Waymo doesn't want a flood of people such that there's always zero availability (with Uber and Lyft they…

I take waymo regularly. It is not within a few cents of Lyft or Uber. It costs me, the consumer, 2x what Lyft or Uber would cost me. I paid $21 for a ride on Mon that was $9-10 across Uber and Lyft. I am price inquisitive so I always double check each time.

I guess the questions then are - why is it 2x the competing price, why do you willing pay 2x, and how many people are willing to pay that 2x?

Consider they are competing against the Lyft/Uber asset-light model of relying on "contractors" who in many cases are incapable of doing the math to realize they are working for minimum wage...

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

#518

Post by Mengkudulangsat »

motohagiography wrote: post #472

CFO's here, let's say I raise a round like that. What do you do with $1B in cash to manage it in the short and near term though? Is it just stuck in the money market or t-bills or what? Even if the growth of the company is the main bet, that cash has to exist as something with a better return than cash. I assume that service is what SV bank provided before it tanked, but someone has to manage that cash for the few ye…

Sometimes the cash doesn't even leave the VC until a capital call is made. This "round" is just to lock in a valuation.

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

#519

Post by coding123 »

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?

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

#520

Post by steveBK123 »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #509
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…

At least this time, people are actually asking the question. NVDA::AI CSCO::.COM

I do worry that unless some of these LLMs actually find a revenue model soon, the self reinforcing bubble is going to pop broadly.

GPUs, servers, datacenters, fabs, power generation/transmission, copper/steel/concrete..

All to train models in an arms race because someone somewhere is going to figure out how to monetize and no one wants to miss the boat.

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