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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

#621

Post by tempaccount420 »

arder wrote: post #159
Etheryte wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this argument makes any sense. Imagine that you have a sentient super intelligent computer, but it's completely airgapped and cut off from the rest of the world. As long as it stays that way it's both safe and super intelligent, no?

It's the old Ex Machina problem though. If the machine is more intelligent than you, any protections you design are likely to be insufficient to contain it. If it's completely incapable of communicating with the outside world then it's of no use. In Ex Machina that was simple - the AI didn't need to connect to the internet or anything like that, it just had to trick the humans into releasing it.

It's fine, we will write the airgap in Rust.

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

#622

Post by __loam »

subsubzero wrote: post #307
digging wrote: post #145

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…

I agree and also disagree. > 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 You are forgetting Japan in WWII and given casualty numbers from island hopping it was going to be a absolutely huge casualty count with US troops, probably something on the order of Englands losses during WW1. Which for them sent them on a…

I'll try to argue his point. The idea that Japan would have resisted to the last man and that a massive amphibious invasion would have been required is kind of a myth. The US pacific submarine fleet had sunk the majority of the Japanese merchant marine to the point that Japan was critically low on war materiel and food. The Japanese navy had lost all of its capital ships and there was a critical shortage of personnel like pilots. The Soviets also invaded and overran Manchuria over a span of weeks. The military wing of the Japanese government certainly wanted to continue fighting but the writing was on the wall. The nuclear bombing of Japanese cities certainly pressed the issue but much of the American Military command in the Pacific thought it was unnecessarily brutal, and Japanese cities had already been devastated by a bombing campaign that included firebombing. I'm not sure that completely aligns with my own views but that's basically the argument, and there are compelling points.

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

#623

Post by sebastiennight »

aithrowaway1987 wrote: post #226
whimsicalism wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this paper is far from “showing this definitively” even if we bought this negative result as somehow “proving impossibility”, i’m not convinced plasticity is necessary for intelligence huge respect for richard sutton though

Isn't "plasticity is not necessary for intelligence" just defining intelligence downwards? It seems like you want to restrict "intelligence" to static knowledge and (apparent) short-term cleverness, but being able to make long-term observation and judgements about a changing world is a necessary component of intelligence in vertebrates. Why exclude that from consideration? More specifically: it is highly implausible…

Let's not forget that software has one significant advantage over humans: versioning.

If I'm a human tasked with editing video (which is the field my startup[0] is in) and a completely new video format comes in, I need the long term plasticity to learn how to use it so I can perform my work.

If a sufficiently intelligent version of our AI model is tasked with editing these videos, and a completely new video format comes in, it does not need to learn to handle it. Not if this model is smart enough to iterate a new model that can handle it.

The new skills and knowledge do not need to be encoded in "the self" when you are a bunch of bytes that can build your successor out of more bytes.

Or, in popular culture terms, the last 30 seconds of this Age of Ultron clip[1].

[0]: https://www.onetake.ai

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA5wYcybkCM&t=25

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

#625

Post by hcta »

lobochrome wrote: post #615
openrisk wrote: post #611

Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? There is a silver lining though. Even if it all goes to near-zero (most likely outcome for all VC investments anyway) the digital world will be one where fast matrix multiply is thoroughly commoditized. This is not a trivial feat. In a sense this will be the true end of the Wintel era. The old world of isolat…

This is a fantastic comment. Very insightful.

[flagged]

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

#626

Post by __loam »

vunderba wrote: post #294
paxys wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the world hasn't ended and no nuke has been launched since the 1940s shows that the system is working. Give the button to a random billionaire and half of us will be dead by next week to improve profit margins.

Bikini atoll and the islanders that no longer live there due to nuclear contamination would like a word with you. Split hairs however you like with the definition of "launch" but those tests went on well through the 1950s.

A nuclear weapon hasn't been detonated in anger since 1945.

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

#627

Post by [deleted] »

hyeonwho4 wrote: post #488
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.

> 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. There's a paradox which appears when AI GDP gets to be greater than say 50% of world GDP: we're pumping up all these economic numbers, generating all the electricity and computational substrate, but do actual humans benefit, or is it economic growth for economic growth's…

[deleted]

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

#628

Post by JonChesterfield »

openrisk wrote: post #616
gizajob wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be” Nvidia

They are now, but will they be winning in 10 (or even 3-5) years? Their shtick is a GPU on steroids. In the bigger picture its a well positioned hack that has ridden two successive speculative bubbles (crypto mining and AI) but its unclear how far this can go. Currently this approach is wildly successful cause nobody else bothered to toil a serious vision about the post-Moore's law era. But make no mistake, people's…

It's not a graphics card hacked to do math any more. It's a general purpose computer with some legacy cruft added to handle graphics work if necessary. Lots of people are working very hard to find something better and have been for at least a decade, probably several.

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

#629

Post by dr_dshiv »

furyofantares wrote: post #425
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'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…

Robots will be better than humans at parenting in no time

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

#630

Post by dr_dshiv »

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".

Congrats on 10k karma :)

One could ask: how is this different from automatic call centers? (eg “for checking accounts, push 1…”) well, people hate those things. If one could create an automated call center that people didn’t hate, it might replace a lot of people.

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