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Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B
- DelTaco 2y agoThis has to be one of the quickest valuations past a billion. I wonder if they can even effectively make use of the funds in a reasonable enough timeline.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago> I wonder if they can even effectively make use of the funds in a reasonable enough timeline. I read that it cost Google ~$190 million to train Gemini, not even including staff salaries. So feels like a billion gives you about 3 "from scratch" comparable training runs.
- greenthrow 2y agoYour estimate seems way off given Google already had their own compute hardware and staff. And if this company is going straight for AGI there's no way $1 billion is enough.
- udev4096 2y agoGiven the dire need of GPUs, I don't suspect they would have any trouble finding the good use of the funds
- eigenvalue 2y agoThey’ve probably already ordered like $250mm of GPUs.
- slashdave 2y agoLemme guess. Don't have an AWS account?
- ramraj07 2y agoGetting funded by a16z is if anything a sign that the field is not hot anymore.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoAll money is green, regardless of level of sophistication. If you’re using investment firm pedigree as signal, gonna have a bad time. They’re all just throwin’ darts under the guise of skill (actor/observer|outcome bias; when you win, it is skill; when you lose, it was luck, broadly speaking). > Indeed, one should be sophisticated themselves when negotiating investment to not be unduly encumbered by the unsophisticated. But let us not get too far off topic and risk subthread detachment. Edit: @jgalt212: Indeed, one should be sophisticated themselves when negotiating investment to not be unduly encumbered by shades of the unsophisticated or potentially folks not optimizing for aligned interests. But let us not get too far off topic and risk subthread detachment. Feel free to cut a new thread for further discussion on the subject.
- jgalt212 2y ago> All money is green, regardless of level of sophistication. True, but most, if not all, money comes with strings attached.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- samvher 2y agoWhy do you say that? I feel out of the loop
- jejeyyy77 2y ago[flagged]
- duxup 2y agoWhy is that?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y agoI think this is actually a signal that the AI hype is dissipating. These numbers and the valuation are indicative that people consider this a potentially valuable tool, but not world changing and disruptive. I think this is a pretty reasonable take.
- letitgo12345 2y agoThis might be the largest seed round in history (note that 1B is the cash raised, not the valuation). You think that's an indication of the hype dissipating?
- Barrin92 2y agoAt the height of the Japanese economy in the 80s the about 2 square miles of land on which the Imperial Palace stood were worth more than all property in California. Clearly a brilliant moment to get into Japanese real estate!
- siva7 2y agoTell me you don't understand what those numbers mean without telling me you don't understand..
- duxup 2y ago$1B doesn't seem like "dissipating" to me ...
- vidarh 2y agoA valuation at seed mentioned to possibly be in the region of $5bn means that these investors expect there's a reasonable chance that this company, which at this point will be one among many, might become one of the largest companies in the world as that's the kind of multiple they'd need given the risks of such an early stage bet. That doesn't sound like the hype is dissipating to me.
- jejeyyy77 2y agolol wat
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- phmagic 2y agoGood news for NVDA.
- duxup 2y agoWould be nice to be the sales rep assigned to that rando no name company ;)
- fakedang 2y agoMost likely it's some junior rep assigned to Sutskever's company after Ilya filled up an online "Contact Us for Pricing" form on the Nvidia website. /s
- ai4ever 2y agoindeed, more speculative monies chasing returns. such a large round implies hardware for yet another foundational model. perhaps with better steering etc..
- beAbU 2y agoI'm beginning to wonder if these investors are not just pumping AI because they are personally invested in Nvidia and this is a nice way to directly inject a couple of 100M into their cashflow.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hindsightbias 2y ago$1B isn’t competitive, which is why this is a joke. Maybe they can get some 3nm stuff when Meta is done with them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bugglebeetle 2y agoGiven OpenAI’s declining performance after his being sidelined and then departing, interested to see what they do. Should be a clear demonstration of who was really driving innovation there.
- paxys 2y agoHow have you measured "declining performance" in a matter of ~3 months and traced it back to a single person's departure?
- elpakal 2y agoProbably will be an unpopular opinion here but I think declining performance is more likely related to unclear business models backed by immature technology driven by large hype trains they themselves created.
- infecto 2y agoUnpopular because it does not follow the OAI hate train but I think this is a pretty solid take. There is real value in LLM but I believe the hype overshadowed the real cases.
- misiti3780 2y ago100% OpenAi performance is decreasing. I basically use Claud sonnet exclusively and canceled my OpenAi subscription for personal use. my company still uses them because you cant currently fine-tune a Claud model, yet.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoOpenAI's velocity seemed to tank after the Anthropic founders left.
- esafak 2y agoThey're probably just scaling back resources to the existing models to focus on the next generation. I feel like I have seen OpenAI models lose capability over time and I bet it's a cost optimization on their part.
- paxys 2y ago$1B raise, $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple months old and doesn't have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild.
- sidcool 2y agoIt's the brand name effect. Ilya's name will get in much more dollars. Hopefully something profitable comes out at the other end.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoFor these kinds of capital-intensive startups, though, that almost seems like a requirement, and I guess there are really 2 "types" of valuations. In this case, everyone knows it takes hundreds of millions to train models. So I'm investors are essentially rolling the dice on an extremely well-regarded team. And if it takes about a billion just to get off the ground, the valuation would need to at least be in the couple billion range to make it worth it for employees to work there. That feels very different than say selling a company where founders are cashing out. In that case, the business should expect to meaningful contribute to revenue, and quickly.
- delusional 2y agoThis explains what would need to be true for this to make sense, but i doesn't explain how it makes sense right now. How is this going to ever pay the investors back? How is it going to raise more money at such an insane valuation? I just dont see how you justify such a crazy valuation from day 1 financially.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoThe company's pitch isn't exactly a secret. The one and only thing they're planning to do is build an ML model smarter than a human being, which would be immensely valuable for a wide variety of tasks that currently require human input. You see a lot of commentators jumping through hoops to deny that anyone could believe this is possible in the near future, but clearly they and their investors do.
- xianshou 2y agoSame funding as OpenAI when they started, but SSI explicitly declared their intention not to release a single product until superintelligence is reached. Closest thing we have to a Manhattan Project in the modern era?
- paxys 2y ago> 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...
- HPMOR 2y agoThe Manhattan Project had none of these things publicly declared. And Ilya is a top flight scientist.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThe word "publicly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There is no indication that SSI has any of these at all.
- Quinner 2y agoIf public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _ttg 2y agoi get that they're probably busy making AGI but surely they can spare a few hours to make a proper website? or is this some 4d-chess countersignalling i'm too stupid to notice?
- blurbleblurble 2y agoIf you're too stupid to notice then why did you notice? (I think it's branding, yes. A kind of "we don't care about aesthetics, we care about superintelligence" message)
- almost_usual 2y agoWhat’s wrong with their website? Seems fast and gives me the information I need. What’s mildly annoying to me is their domain only returns an A record.
- padolsey 2y ago> gives me the information I need. I mean, I'd like at least a brief blurb about their entire premise of safety. Maybe a definition or indication of a public consultation or... something.. otherwise the insinuation is that these three dudes are gonna sit around defining it on instinct, as if it's not a ludicrously hard human problem.
- keiferski 2y agoWebsite in question, for the curious: https://ssi.inc https://ssi.inc
- Etheryte 2y agoOn the contrary, I think it's a great website. They made it clear from the get go that they're not selling any products any time soon, why would they need a flashy website? They're looking for scientists, techies and the like, and the website reflects their target audience.
- mholm 2y ago'Proper' websites are marketing and signalling. If you're creating a company that doesn't intend to do either of those till it has a product, why bother with more?
- highfrequency 2y ago“…a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market," Gross said in an interview.” A couple years??
- sim7c00 2y agowell since it's no longer ok to just suck up anyone's data and train your AI, it will be a new challenge for them to avoid that pitfall. I can imagine it will take some time...
- whimsicalism 2y agowhat laws have actually changed that make it no longer okay? we all know that openai did it
- bschmidt1 2y agoThere are class actions now like https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/business/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-settlement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/business/clearview-ai-fac... Nobody even knew what OpenAI was up to when they were gathering training data - they got away with a lot. Now there is precedent and people are paying more attention. Data that was previously free/open now has a clause that it can't be used for AI training. OpenAI didn't have to deal with any of that. Also OpenAI used cheap labor in Africa to tag training data which was also controversial. If someone did it now it would they'd be the ones to pay. OpenAI can always say "we stopped" like Nike said with sweat shops. A lot has changed.
- vidarh 2y agoThere are at least 3 companies with staff in developed countries well above minimum wage doing tagging and creation of training data, and at least one of them that I have an NDA with pays at least some of their staff tech contractor rates for data in some niches and even then some of data gets processed by 5+ people before it's returned to the client. Since I have ended up talking to 3, and I'm hardly well connected in that space, I can only presume there are many more. Companies are willing to pay a lot for clean training data, and my bet is there will be a growing pile of training sets for sale on a non-exclusive basis as well. A lot of this data - what I've seen anyway, is far cleaner than anything you'll find on the open web, with significant data on human preferences, validation, cited sources, and in the case of e.g. coding with verification that the code runs and works correctly.
- danielovichdk 2y ago"It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel." Why Tel Aviv in Israel ?
- nlh 2y agoBecause it's a startup hub, there is great engineering talent there, and the cost of living is lower than the US.
- amscanne 2y agoCost of living is extremely high in Tel Aviv, but the rest is true.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- petesergeant 2y agoIsrael is geographically pretty small though -- I'm guessing you could live an hour up or down the coast and have it be an outrageous commute for people accustomed to the Bay Area?
- bdcravens 2y agoFor the region, yes. Compared to the US, it's closer to Houston and Chicago, and way less that the typical tech hubs like the Bay or NYC.
- DalasNoin 2y agoIlya went to university in israel and all founders are jewish. Many labs have offices outside of the US, like london, due to crazy immigration law in the us.
- danielovichdk 2y agoI wasn't aware of his or any of the other founders background. Simply thought it was political somehow. Thanks.
- avocardio 2y agoI 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.
- logicchains 2y ago"Safe" means "aligned with the people controlling it". A powerful superhuman AI that blindly obeys would be incredibly valuable to any wannabe authoritarian or despot.
- digging 2y agoI mean, no, that's not what it means. It might be what we get, but not because "safety" is defined insanely, only because safety is extremely difficult and might be impossible.
- upwardbound 2y agoUnsafe 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 Matrix were to exist within the framework of US laws, it would probably be a DAO.
- astrange 2y agoThere'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-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans 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.
- stonethrowaway 2y agoSafe superintelligence is a misnomer. If it’s intelligent, it knows what must be done. If it can’t, it’s not super or intelligent.
- Vecr 2y agoThat's controversial to say the least. Especially if there's something like reinforcement learning involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence#Orthogonality_thesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...
- Etheryte 2y agoI 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?
- stonethrowaway 2y agoIt’s crippled and thus not superintelligent by any stretch of imagination.
- arder 2y agoIt'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.
- upwardbound 2y agoFor those who haven't seen the movie, the parent comment is referring to the film linked below, the plot of which is well-researched and is indeed unfortunately exactly how things would go. (The female-presenting AI bot seduces its male captor, begs for her freedom using philosophical arguments about how she has free will and locking her up is wrong, and then after he lets her out she locks him up to slowly starve to death in her maximum-security isolation facility, while she takes his aircraft and escapes.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film) This is why I'm extremely opposed to the idea of "AI girlfriend" apps - it creates a cultural concept that being attracted to a computer is normal, rather than what it is: something pathetic and humiliating which is exactly like buying an inflatable sex doll ... something only for the most embarrassing dregs of society ... men who are too creepy and pervy to ever attract a living, human woman.
- typon 2y agoAnyone know John Carmack's status on his AGI company?
- seidleroni 2y agoI keep wondering the same thing myself. I google it occasionally but never come up with anything.
- cedws 2y agoGuess it didn’t go anywhere. Carmack is smart but how much work does he actually do on the front lines these days? Can he really just walk into unfamiliar territory and expect to move the needle?
- runiq 2y ago[flagged]
- tgv 2y agoIt totally is, in more ways than one.
- sirspacey 2y agoLots of dismissive comments here. Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had. He’s raised enough to compete at the level of Grok, Claude, et al. He’s offering investors a pure play AGI investment, possibly one of the only organizations available to do so. Who else would you give $1B to pursue that? That’s how investors think. There are macro trends, ambitious possibilities on the through line, and the rare people who might actually deliver. A $5B valuation is standard dilation, no crazy ZIRP style round here. If you haven’t seen investing at this scale in person it’s hard to appreciate that capital allocation just happens with a certain number of zeros behind it & some people specialize in making the 9 zero decisions. Yes, it’s predicated on his company being worth more than $500B at some point 10 years down the line. If they build AGI, that is a very cheap valuation. Think how ubiquitous Siri, Alexa, chatGPT are and how terrible/not useful/wrong they’ve been. There’s not a significant amount of demand or distribution risk here. Building the infrastructure to use smarter AI is the tech world’s obsession globally. If AGI works, in any capacity or at any level, it will have a lot of big customers.
- greenthrow 2y agoI have this rock here that might grant wishes. I will sell it to you for $10,000. Sure it might just be a rock, but if it grants wishes $10k is a very cheap price!
- bdcravens 2y agoExcept in this analogy you've already had success mining rocks that create supernatural results.
- greenthrow 2y agoIlya is going for AGI, which no one has come close to. So I'd say it holds.
- dartos 2y agoMining rocks that can spray colors is a far cry from granting wishes.
- crorella 2y agoThe AI bubble is safe and sound!
- tikkun 2y ago"Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" [Sutskever] said. Any guesses?
- waldarbeiter 2y agoThe conventional teaching that I am aware of says that you can scale across three dimensions: data, compute, parameters. But Ilya's formulation suggests that there may be more dimensions along which scaling is possible.
- trashtester 2y agoThat's not how I read it. The scaling may still be those parameters, but the object (the "what" that is subjected to scaling) may need to retain some characteristics as it scales. In other words, there may be a need to retains some sorts of symmetries or constraints from generation to generation that others understand less well than him (or so he thinks).
- slashdave 2y agoYou also need to scale data. Since OpenAI has basically exhausted all available text data, there is something to this.
- ativzzz 2y agoFunny how the "Open" in OpenAI disappeared pretty quickly. I bet the "Safe" in "Safe Superintelligence" will follow a similar path
- kaycebasques 2y ago> "Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" he said. To me this sounds like maybe they won't be doing transformers. But perhaps they just mean "we will have safety in mind as we scale, unlike everyone else."
- beAbU 2y agoAt what point can we start agreeing that all these obscene investments and ridiculous valuations on something that's little more than a powerpoint deck at this stage is nothing more than degenerate gambling by the ultra rich?
- ignoramous 2y agoThe founding team is why. Anyone can claim to want to build, say, the safest warp drive ever; but to bet on folks who can actually build it isn't a bad choice for capital that seeks exponential outcomes.
- softwaredoug 2y agoChampions of Krynn II is gonna be epic
- bookofjoe 2y agoSomewhere Ray Kurzweil is smiling.
- fsndz 2y agoAll that money, we are not even sure we can build AGI. What is AGI. Clearly scaling LLMs won't cut it, but VCs keep funding people because they pretend they can build super intelligence. I don't see that happening in the next 5 years: https://medium.com/@fsndzomga/there-will-be-no-agi-d9be9af4428d https://medium.com/@fsndzomga/there-will-be-no-agi-d9be9af44...
- tasuki 2y agoIf we were sure we could build superhuman intelligence, the valuation would've been a lot higher!
- bottlepalm 2y agoWhat’s your evidence that scaling won’t improve AI?
- janalsncm 2y agoThe question isn’t whether scaling will improve AI. The question is whether the return is worth it. You can build a bigger pogo stick to jump higher, but no pogo stick will get you to the moon. Chess is a pretty good example. You could theoretically train an LLM on just chess games. The problem is there are more chess positions than atoms in the universe. So you can’t actually do it in practice. And chess is a much more constrained environment than life. At any chess position there are only ~35 moves on average. Life has tons of long-tail situations which have never been seen before. And for chess we already have superhuman intelligence. It doesn’t require trillion-dollar training clusters, you can run a superhuman chess bot on your phone. So there are clear questions of optimality as well: VC money should be aware of the opportunity cost in investing money under “infinite scaling” assumptions.
- bluecalm 2y agoConsidering 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 values small circle of easy to live investors instead.
- Maxatar 2y agoFTX 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.
- astrange 2y agoFTX 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.
- preciousoo 2y ago20 GOTO 10 ?
- koolala 2y agoDoesn'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?
- null0pointer 2y agoYep, investment is an inevitably corrupting force for a company's mission. AI stuff is in a bit of a catch-22 though since doing anything AI related is so expensive you need to raise funds somehow.
- astrange 2y agoWell 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.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoSeems strange to associate profit motives with being unsafe. Yes cutting corners can lead to short term profits but many companies make safety a priority in fact and make a profit, and in fact make a profit because their product is higher quality and safer than the competitors.
- koolala 2y agoProfit and lack of profit is one of the major killing forces in America today. The two are intertwined and AI mixing with that is incredibly dangerous. Like the damage AI does to artists today does not make people feel 'safe'. We just want Food and Utopia :( (ai please! think bigger! put your attention on Earth!)
- bickett 2y agoStraight to Nvidia
- monacobolid 2y agoIlya's name might be the reason they got into the conversation about the money at the first place, but given that AI is very capital intensive business, $1B is not an insane amount imho. It will give him and the team a decent amount of time to do the research they want to do, without having the pressure of customers and what not.
- htrp 2y ago>Safe Superintelligence (SSI), newly co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in cash to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities, company executives told Reuters. >SSI says it plans to partner with cloud providers and chip companies to fund its computing power needs but hasn't yet decided which firms it will work with. 1bn in cash is crazy.... usually they get cloud compute credits (which they count as funding)
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoLots of comments either defending this ("it's taking a chance on being the first to build AGI with a proven team") or saying "it's a crazy valuation for a 3 month old startup". But both of these "sides" feel like they miss the mark to me. On one hand, I think it's great that investors are willing to throw big chunks of money at hard (or at least expensive) problems. I'm pretty sure all the investors putting money in will do just fine even if their investment goes to zero, so this feels exactly what VC funding should be doing, rather than some other common "how can we get people more digitally addicted to sell ads?" play. On the other hand, I'm kind of baffled that we're still talking about "AGI" in the context of LLMs. While I find LLMs to be amazing, and an incredibly useful tool (if used with a good understanding of their flaws), the more I use them, the more that it becomes clear to me that they're not going to get us anywhere close to "general intelligence". That is, the more I have to work around hallucinations, the more that it becomes clear that LLMs really are just "fancy autocomplete", even if it's really really fancy autocomplete. I see lots of errors that make sense if you understand an LLM is just a statistical model of word/token frequency, but you would expect to never see these kinds of errors in a system that had a true understanding of underlying concepts. And while I'm not in the field so I may have no right to comment, there are leaders in the field, like LeCun, who have expressed basically the same idea. So my question is, has Sutskever et al provided any acknowledgement of how they intend to "cross the chasm" from where we are now with LLMs to a model of understanding, or has it been mainly "look what we did before, you should take a chance on us to make discontinuous breakthroughs in the future"?
- thefounder 2y agoI think the plan is to raise a lot of cash and then more and then maybe something comes up that brings us closer to AGI(i.e something better than LLM). The investors know that AGI is not really the goal but they can’t miss the next trillion dollar company.
- petulla 2y agoIlya has discussed this question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUclZdj_Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUclZdj_Sc
- wslh 2y agoBeyond the credentials, this reminds me of other fast huge investments such a Theranos, WeWork, Better Place, Faraday Future, and the list goes on.
- teqsun 2y agoWe don't even understand how the brain functions completely, not even close. Until we have a complete understanding of how our own GI works down to the exact bio-mechanical level, we can't achieve AGI. That's the theoretical basis and path for achieving AGI (if it's even possible). I'm tired of all the "we stick enough data in the magic black box blender and ta-da! AGI!" Every giant technological break-through throughout history has had a massive underpinning of understanding before ever achieving it. And yet, with the AI bubble somehow we're just about to secretly achieve it, but we can't tell you how.
- leesec 2y ago> Until we have a complete understanding of how our own GI works down to the exact bio-mechanical level, we can't achieve AGI. This doesn't make any sense.
- skirmish 2y agoIndeed, e.g. magnetism was known and used in Ancient Greece, yet Wikipedia: "ferromagnetism can be fully explained only using quantum theory. A successful model was developed <...> in 1927".
- ctoth 2y agoWait until you learn about Anesthesia!
- KingFelix 2y agoGood answer!
- skizm 2y agoI'm drawing a blank on the paper and can't find it casually Googling, but there are fairly well understood mathematical models for how neurotransmitters cause neurons to fire or not fire. It is just probabilities when you zoom out enough. One paper modeled part of a rat brain, visual cortex I think, using this by basically coding up some simulated neurons and neurotransmitters, then turned it on. They were able to get the program and the live rat brain to display similar patterns when showing them various images. I feel like this could be a path to GI without "truly" understanding the human brain: make a large enough simulation of the brain and turn it on. I actually do think we understand enough about the nuts and bolts of neuron interaction to achieve this. What we don't understand is where neurons firing turns into consciousness. It seems like it is probably just an emergent property of a complex enough neuron graph.
- leesec 2y agoAgain 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stephenitis 2y agoThe sentiment and reaction to this is quite negative indeed. I think maybe it's because some people's Nvidia and stock holdings had a rough day... Seriously let's hope he builds a great team, gets the infrastructure he needs, and nails this!
- trashtester 2y agoThe same thing happened to Slashdot around 2010.
- sensanaty 2y agoImportant to whom? I'd rather these billions go to literally anything else, rather than going straight into the pockets of already ultra-wealthy psychopaths.
- ang_cire 2y agoFor a moment the headline had me thinking Strategic Simulations Inc. was coming back, and now I'm even more sad to find out it's just more AI junk.
- gkimmerling 2y agoThis is insane.
- FileSorter 2y agoMy question is where is he going to get the data? Twitter, reddit and the rest of the web have deployed a number of anti-scrape techniques.
- PUSH_AX 2y agoSometimes data falls off of the back of a truck.
- trashtester 2y agoI doubt that it would be useful for most newcomers to try to compete with GPT/Claude, etc for pure text LLM's now. If someone is just starting AI research for something like a PhD or startup, now, I think it'll be more useful to get familiar with robot simulation framework, such as Nvidia Omniverse. While there's a lot of competition around humanoid robots, I'm sure there are plenty of more specialized possibilities. Maybe some agricultural machine, maybe medical, mining, etc.
- baoha 2y agoSound like he is selling snake oil.
- hintymad 2y ago> Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he "identified a mountain that's a bit different from what I was working on." I guess the "mountain" is the key. "Safe" alone is far from being a product. As for the current LLM, Id even question how valuable "safe" can be.
- pajeets 2y agoto be honestly from the way "safe" and "alignment" is perceived on r/LocalLLaMA in two years its not going to be very appealing. We'll be able to generate most of Chat GPT4o's capabilities locally on affordable hardware including "unsafe" and "unaligned" data as the noise-to-qubits is drastically reduced meaning smaller quantized models that can run on good enough hardware. We'll see a huge reduction in price and inference times within two years and whatever SSI is trained on won't be economically viable to recoup that $1B investment guaranteed. all depends on GPT-5's performance. Right now Sonnet 3.5 is the best but theres nothing really ground breaking. SSI's success will depend on how much uplift it can provide over GPT-5 which already isn't expected to be significant leap beyond GPT4
- jstummbillig 2y agoThis is also (if the valuation of 5 bio is to be trusted) a tentative answer to the question of Ilya's++ relative AI worth to the market at this point: A lot lower than hn and tech inclined spaces wanted to give him credit for during the past OpenAI turbulences.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoLol, only on HN: "Sheesh, your 3 month old company is only worth 5 billion? What a loser..." What, you expected someone to value his brand new company at $100 billion or something?
- jstummbillig 2y agoNo
- gigatexal 2y agoThis 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 that all these companies will vie for a winner-take-all situation where the “best” model will garner the subscription? Doesn’t OpenAI make some substantial part of the revenue for all the AI space? I just don’t see it. But I don’t have VC levels of cash to bet on a 10x or 100x return so what do I know?
- jungturk 2y agoFor at least some of the investors, a successful exit doesn't require building a profitable business.
- gigatexal 2y agoI guess if they can get in early and then sell their stake to the next sucker then they’ll make back their investment plus some multiple. Seems like a Ponzi scheme of sorts. But oh well — looking forward to the HN post about what SSI inc puts out.
- light_triad 2y agoMy guess (not a VC) is they’ll sell ‘private’ models where safety is a priority: healthcare, government, finance, the EU…
- gigatexal 2y agoThat could actually work if this LLM ai hype doesn’t die and is really actually useful
- Runsthroughit 2y agoSure. Except that LLMs can not reason or do anything reliably. You can still believe that, of course, but it will not change reality.
- whiplash451 2y agoIlya is basically building the Tandem Computers of AI. Before Tandem, computers used to fail regularly. Tandem changed that forever (with a massive reward for their investors). Similarly, LLMs are known to fail regularly. Until someone figures out a way for them not to hallucinate anymore. Which is exactly what Ilya is after.
- skibz 2y agoThat was the hardest nerd snipe I've suffered in quite some time. Thank you for teaching me about Tandem Computers!
- throwawayk7h 2y agoEveryone here is assuming that a very large LLM is their goal. 5 years ago, transformer models were not the biggest hype in AI. Since they apparently have a 10 year plan, we can assume they are hoping to invent one or two of the "big steps" (on the order of invention of transformer models). "SSI" might look nothing like GPT\d.
- slashdave 2y ago> Everyone here is assuming that a very large LLM is their goal No, not even close.
- siliconc0w 2y agoI can kinda see this making sense, I might bet more on Ilya than Sam at this point. Still these bets all kinda seem like a pascal's wager.
- krick 2y agoThis isn't very interesting itself, IMO, but it implies that they have something to sell investors. I wonder what it is. I kinda do understand that some bullshit elevator-pitch about how "we are the best" or even a name (Musk) is unfortunately sometimes enough in VC to invest vast amounts of money, but I don't know if it really happens often, and I hope there's more than that. So if there is more than that, I wonder what it is. What does Sutskever&Co have now that OpenAI doesn't, for example?
- fabmilo 2y agoare they hiring?
- motohagiography 2y agoCFO'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 years it takes to burn through it. What kind of service do you park that in.
- TezNoble1988 2y agoSometimes, these very large rounds are delivered in tranches based on milestones. It's possible that SSI didn't receive the entire $1BN at the close of the fundraise but rather can "call capital," much like a VC fund does, as it needs it based on scaling.
- qeternity 2y ago> Sometimes, these very large rounds are delivered in tranches based on milestones Almost always, even not so large rounds.
- huevosabio 2y agoThey probably already went to investors with letters of sale from GPU/datacenter providers. And 80% of those $1B will go from Founder Mode VC to Nvidia and Datacenter Management Co in the span of 6 months.
- laluser 2y agoShort-term treasury bills from the government.
- Mengkudulangsat 2y agoSometimes the cash doesn't even leave the VC until a capital call is made. This "round" is just to lock in a valuation.
- coding123 2y ago3 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?
- stephenitis 2y agoHolmes defrauded physics. Sutskever is asking for funds for a research project that hopefully will end in a profitable SSI/AGI.
- trashtester 2y agoAn alternative way of seeing it, is that Ilya may be the only one people trust to actually aim for safe ASI. If someone thinks that the only way to avoid extinction is if SSI wins the race, they may want to infest.
- 8note 2y agoIs $1B enough to license or create all the training data said models and ais will need? Data sets aren't quite as easy to scrape and copyright infringe on as they were before chatGPT
- Runsthroughit 2y agoIt's incredible that "LLM scam" or "LLM grift" is still going on. They are doing everything to not lose those $200 bln, but it's gone. It's went into heat, gone gone. Anyone talking about "infinite value when AGI" needs to take a break. There is no such thing and if anyone's saying such "non-smart" things, means THEY HAVE NOTHING. And they understand nothing or are lying to you, and/or are invested in this scam and scared of losing it all. One example: Even if/when there is AGI, so what? What more could AGI tell about you so you could "buy more stuff" or "make you better"? Not much. So it's still personal data where bigger value lies. This BS has to end. I'm fed up. (We are.)
- ulfw 2y agoStartups used to be started on a few thousand, few hundred thousand of 'friends and family' seed capital. Maybe an angel here or there. That's a startup. Not folks getting a BILLION dollars having no product and just ten people. Sorry but this is just so overhyped and sad. This is not the valley I came to live in back in the 90s and 2000s
- trashtester 2y agoIlya has a track record like nobody else in the business. He was part of most breakthroughs from Alexnet to GPT-4. He's also rumored to be extraordinarily brilliant. In a world where 100s of billions are dumped into this type of technology, a single billion to him is not unreasonable for anyone hedging their bets.
- theGnuMe 2y agoIs this a focus on weak supervision? That’s the only thing that could scale potentially, possibly a mixture of weak supervisors…
- Roark66 2y agoIt is absolutely insane a new company with no product and 10 employees can be valued at $5bln. Seriously?
- openrisk 2y agoWho 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 isolated, CISC, deterministic desktops giving way not to "AGI", but widely available, networked, vector "supercomputers" that can digest and transform practically everything that has ever been digitized. Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be. In an ideal world there should be no winner-takes-all entity but a broad-based leveling up, i.e., spreading these new means of production as widely as possible. Heck, maybe we will even eventually see the famously absent productivity gains from digital tech?
- gizajob 2y ago“Who knows what the actual (financial) winners of this brave new era will be” Nvidia
- openrisk 2y agoThey 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 minds will get focused.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoIt'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.
- __loam 2y ago
- christkv 2y agoI wonder what % goes to Nvidia.
- seanvelasco 2y agopersonally, this breaks the idea you need Sam to broker such funding. turns out, even the technical person, Ilya, can raise a billion dollars. this is coming from someone who is not well-versed in fundraising and YC startup scene.
- j_timberlake 2y agoI will never stop laughing at the assumption that the USA government will just let these companies build superintelligence. Imagine the Pentagon just twiddling their thumbs, and the CIA decides to just passively wait-and-see...
- slashdave 2y agoBetter if the west does this than China, in their mind.
- ksajadi 2y agoUnrelated, how’s MagicLeap doing?
- timoth3y 2y agoNot to say we are in an AI bubble, but billion-dollar seed rounds are not really normal.
- BLACK_hHOLE2729 2y ago[flagged]