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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

#741

Post by czl »

robertlagrant wrote: post #683
trashtester wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have no evidence that superintelligence will be developed. Fundamentally, we have no evidence of anything that will happen in the future. All we do is to extrapolate from the past through the present, typically using some kind of theory of how the world operates. The belief that we will eventually (whether it's this year or in 1000+ years), really only hinges on the following 3 assumptions: 1) The human brain is…

> Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices. This is your weak link. I don't see why progress will be a straight line and not a sloping-off curve. You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light.

> I don't see why progress will be a straight line and not a sloping-off curve.

Technological progress often appears linear in the short term, but zooming out reveals an exponential curve, similar to compound interest.

> You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light.

Consider the trajectory of maximum speeds over millennia, not just recent history. We've achieved speeds unimaginable to our ancestors, mostly in space—a realm they couldn't conceive. While reaching light speed is challenging, we're exploring novel concepts like light-propelled nano-vehicles. If consciousness is information-based, could light itself become a "vehicle"?

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

#742

Post by czl »

trashtester wrote: post #695
robertlagrant wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assumption 3 is mostly techno-optimism, or an extrapolation of the trend that we are able to build ever more advanced devices. This is your weak link. I don't see why progress will be a straight line and not a sloping-off curve. You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light.

> This is your weak link. I don't think so at all. I'm personally convinced that humanity EVENTUALLY will build something more "intelligent" than human brains. > I don't see I see > You shouldn't see the progress we've made in vehicle speed and assume we can hit the speed of light There are laws of Physics that prevent us from moving faster than the speed of light. There IS a corresponding limit for computation [1],…

> Evolutionary history points towards brain size being limited by a combination of what is safe for the female hip width and also what amount of energy cost can be justified by increasing the size of the brain.

If bigger brains lead to higher intelligence, why do many highly intelligent people have average-sized heads? And do they need to eat much more to fuel their high IQs? If larger brains were always better, wouldn’t female hips have evolved to accommodate them? I think human IQ might be where it is because extremely high intelligence vs. what we on average have now) often leads to fewer descendants. Less awareness of reality can lead to more "reproductive bliss."

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

#743

Post by obmelvin »

obmelvin wrote: post #372
jejeyyy77 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if" is the name of the game in investing. you say you don't see it. fine. these investors do - thats why they are investing and you are not.

That's a very dismissive and unrealistic statement. There are plenty of investors investing in things such as AI and crypto out of FOMO who either see something that isn't there or are just pretending to see something in the hope of getting rich. Obviously, there are plenty of investors who don't fall into this situation. But lets not pretend that just because someone has a lot of money or invests a lot of money that…

I suppose my phrasing was a bit harsh at the end. To be clear, I mean that it doesn't mean they know what they are doing on every investment. Investing misses happen! People are wrong!

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

#744

Post by sensanaty »

leesec wrote: post #229

Again 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.

Important to whom? I'd rather these billions go to literally anything else, rather than going straight into the pockets of already ultra-wealthy psychopaths.

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

#745

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

accountnum wrote: post #739
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And even if he did, I could name you a couple of CEOs of AI labs with better models that would disagree, or even Turing award laureates. This is by no means a consensus stance in the expert community. I disagree - there is pretty widespread agreement that reasoning is a weakness, even among the best models, (and note Chollet's $1M ARC prize competition to spur improvements), but the big labs all seem to think that…

A weakness of the current models in some domains considered useful, yes - but not a fundamental limitation of the architecture. I see no consensus on the latter whatsoever. The ARC challenge tests spatial reasoning, something we humans are obviously quite good at, given 4 billion years of evolutionary optimization. But as I said, there is no "general reasoning", it's all domain dependent. A child does better at the s…

> If the failures of previous predictions - those that considered Chess or Go as unmistakable signals of true general reasoning - have taught us anything, it's that general reasoning simply does not exist.

I don't think DeepBlue or AlphaGo/etc were meant to teach us anything - they were just showcases of technological prowess by the companies involved, demonstrations of (narrow) machine intelligence.

But...

Reasoning (differentiated from simpler shallow "reactive" intelligence) is basically multi-step chained what-if prediction, and may involve a branching exploration of alternatives ("ok, so that wouldn't work, so what if I did this instead ..."), so could be framed as a tree search of sorts, not entirely disimilar to the MCTS used by DeepBlue or AlphaGo.

Of course general reasoning is a lot more general than playing a game like Chess or Go since the type of moves/choices available/applicable will vary at each step (these aren't all "game move" steps), as will the "evaluation function" that predicts what'll happen if we took that step, but "tree search" isn't a bad way to conceptualize the process, and this is true regardless of the domain(s) of knowledge over which the reasoning is operating.

Which is to say, that reasoning is in fact a generalized process, and one who' nature has some corresponding requirements (e.g. keeping track of state) for any machine to be capable of performing it ...

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

#746

Post by denizener »

rl3 wrote: post #450
IncreasePosts wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Anyone who solves AGI will probably just have their models and data confiscated by the government.

In addition, it's also a big assumption that money will continue to matter or hold its value in such a world.

It is also entirely possible that if we get to AGI, it just stops interacting with us completely.

It is why I find the AI doomer stuff so ridiculous. I am surrounded by less intelligent lifeforms. I am not interested in some kind of genocide against the common ant or fly. I have no interest in interacting with them at all. It is boring.

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

#747

Post by dartos »

lmm wrote: post #694
dartos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I’m saying is you used the word “if” a lot there. AGI assumes exponential, preferably infinite and continuous improvement, something unseen before in business or nature. Neither siri nor Alexa were sold as AGI and neither alone come close to a $1B product. gpt and other LLMs has quickly become a commodity, with AI companies racing to the bottom for inference costs. I don’t really see the plan, product wise. Moreo…

> AI is obviously not going to improve exponentially forever (literally nothing in the observed universe does) Sure, but it doesn't have to continue forever to be wildly profitable. If it can keep the exponential growth running for another couple of rounds, that's enough to make everyone involved rich. No-one knows quite where the limit is, so it can reasonably be worth a gamble.

Exactly.

That’s fine and good for investors.

I couldn’t care less about the business side of technology.

Im an engineer and a technophile and as an engineer and a technophile it sours me to hear someone dangle sci-fi level AGI as a pitch to investors when we’re clearly not there right now and ,in my opinion, this current wave of of basically brute force statistics based predictive models will not be the technique that gets us there.

It makes the cynic in me, and many others probably, cringe.

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

#748

Post by dartos »

rpozarickij wrote: post #324
dartos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I’m saying is you used the word “if” a lot there. AGI assumes exponential, preferably infinite and continuous improvement, something unseen before in business or nature. Neither siri nor Alexa were sold as AGI and neither alone come close to a $1B product. gpt and other LLMs has quickly become a commodity, with AI companies racing to the bottom for inference costs. I don’t really see the plan, product wise. Moreo…

> literally nothing in the observed universe does There are many things on earth that don't exist anywhere else in the universe (as far as we know). Life is one of them. Just think how unfathomably complex human brains are compared to what's out there in space. Just because something doesn't exist anywhere in the universe doesn't mean that humans can't create it (or humans can't create a machine that creates somethin…

> Just think how unfathomably complex human brains are compared to what's out there in space.

There are plenty of complex phenomena in space, but I don’t need to go that far.

Some other animal brains act like ours, at least as far as we can observe.

There is nothing anywhere that grows exponentially forever.

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

#749

Post by waveBidder »

davedx wrote: post #591
waveBidder wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could maybe make a case for CNNs, but the fact that they're feed-forward rather than feedback means they're fundamentally representing a different object (CNN is a function, whereas the visual system is a feedback network). Transformers, while not exactly functions, don't have a feedback mechanism similar to e.g. the cortical algorithm or any other neuronal structure I'm aware of. In general, the ML field is less…

Thanks for the considered answer. What is the cortical algorithm? (Yeah, it's been quite a few years since I did any bio psych...)

As far as I understand it, there's a standing hypothesis that cortical columns have a similar structure that is designed to learn arbitrary patterns via predictive coding, and that a lot of human plasticity arises from the interaction and flexibility of these columns.

Numenta has attempted to implement a system to this effect (see the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory) for quite some time with not particularly much success.

Personally I think the kinds of minds we create in silico will end up being very different, because the advantages and disadvantages of the medium are just very different; for example, having a much stronger central processor and much weaker distributed memory, along with specialized precise circuits in addition to probabilistic ones.

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

#750

Post by famouswaffles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #553
famouswaffles wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that for some bizare reason, people have standards of reasoning (for machines) that only exist in fiction or their own imagination. It is beyond silly to dump an architecture for a limitation the human brain has. A reasoning engine that can iterate indefinitely with no external aid does not exist in real life. That the transformer also has this weakness is not any reason for it to have capabilities less t…

LLMs are here to stay until something better replaces them, and will be used for those things they are capable of. It shouldn't be surprising they are not great at reasoning, or everything one would hope for from an AGI, since they simply were not built for that. If you look at the development history, the transformer was a successor to LSTM-based seq-2-seq models using Bahdanau attention, whose main goal was to more…

Reasoning is reasoning. "Look as if it is reasoning" is an imaginary distinction you've made up. One that is very clear because everybody touting this "fake reasoning" rhetoric is still somehow unable to define a testable version of reasoning that disqualifies LLMs without also disqualifying some chunk of humans.

>As humans we routinely think for seconds/minutes or even hours before speaking or acting

No human is iterating on a base thought for hours uninterrupted lol so this is just moot

>with out-of-training-set reasoning weakness being a notable limitation that people such as Demis Hassabis have recently conceded.

Humans reason weaker out of training. LLMs are simply currently worse

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