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Sam has expressed his desired to get really good AI to become a thing. Since YC does a ton of tech I'd bet $10 it's AI. But of course this is just my useless s
by BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Sam has expressed his desired to get really good AI to become a thing. Since YC does a ton of tech I'd bet $10 it's AI.
But of course this is just my useless speculation :)
- nmrm2 11y agoNuclear would also make sense? AI might make more sense becaues nuclear seems like a hard place to do "heretical" research, but what do I know
- acidburnNSA 11y agoNuclear makes sense. The fluid-fueled nuclear company he's the chairman of (Transatomic) is considered at least slightly heretical by the nuclear industry, which is used to its solid fuel water-cooled reactors. They also use used nuclear fuel (i.e. transuranics in nuclear waste) as fuel, which could be called heretical because recycling nuclear waste was once outlawed in the US by Jimmy Carter (but it no longer is illegal).
- hugh4 11y agoTrouble is that the amounts of money we're talking about don't go far in nuclear research.
- acidburnNSA 11y agoI think $10M can go pretty far in basic feasibility studies needed for the Transatomic reactor. You need a bunch of diffusion couple experiments and hydride stability studies. Lots of furnaces, fume hoods, and surrogate fission products. But you're right that when you get to major component qualification then yeah, $10M is nothing.
- acidburnNSA 11y agoI meant UPower, not Transatomic. Whoops!
- waterlesscloud 11y agoHe's also chairman of the board for two nuclear power companies. And YC itself has been branching into biotech and hardware and other science-y companies. Anything seems possible to me.
- jerf 11y agoA 25-year estimate for how long it will take them to develop an AI that will be able to create biological organisms that utilize nuclear power directly? Sounds reasonable.
- acidburnNSA 11y agoMy money's on nuclear. Advanced nuclear designs regularly claim 25 year timeframes for design, qualification testing, licensing activities, supply chain development, and construction. Transatomic is proposing concepts that require long qualification and licensing developments, many of which could make meaningful progress in a small lab with a $10M initial budget. You have to produce your salt fuel and do materials testing with surrogate fission products (e.g. stable isotopes) over long periods of time. They also have to do hydride transport experiments which can be done on a pretty small scale.
- DrNuke 11y agoExciting times ahead!
- acidburnNSA 11y agoWhoops, I mean UPower, not Transatomic
- mrdrozdov 11y ago25 years is a reasonable number for how long it took deep learning research to begin getting traction. I would think AI would be a strange choice since it seems like there are a lot of research opportunities in academia and industry for this topic, but for the same reason I would say AI research is ripe for disruption.
- rezistik 11y agoMy bet is on renewable energy/sustainability, agriculture or biotech, with energy being my first choice. Sam has expressed serious concern about powering the future. His first(only?) deviations from the "No Board Seat" policy were two energy companies.
- InquilineKea 11y agoHow would funding AI through YC Research be different from what MIRI and FLI do?
- mtraven 11y agoWell, they mostly support research designed to prevent harmful AI, which is important but hardly the only or best approach to AI research.
- srean 11y agoNow if that "AI" were to be changed to "machine learning" that would indeed make me perk up.
- mrdrozdov 11y agoIs there any way that AI does not include machine learning?
- robotresearcher 11y agoAI is not really lacking for funding and research activity right now.
- T-A 11y agoSafe AI [1], on the other hand, has [2] running on < $1M and [3] running on $10M (!) from Musk. Throw in Yudkowsky's recently expressed interest in startups [4] and you can guess what I am guessing. [1] http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 [2] https://intelligence.org/donate/ https://intelligence.org/donate/ [3] http://futureoflife.org/AI/AI_beneficial http://futureoflife.org/AI/AI_beneficial [4] http://hpmor.com/notes/119/ http://hpmor.com/notes/119/