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Lots of dismissive comments here. Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after br

Lots 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Except in this analogy you've already had success mining rocks that create supernatural results.
  - greenthrow 2y ago
    Ilya is going for AGI, which no one has come close to. So I'd say it holds.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Mining rocks that can spray colors is a far cry from granting wishes.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    supernatural results? my dude, I'd rather have a washing machine than chatgpt.
    - bdcravens 2y ago
      I was speaking to the analogy being made (a wish granting rock), not chatgpt.
dartos 2y ago
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. Moreover you say: > 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. Which is absolutely true, but that doesn’t imply more breakthroughs are just around the corner, nor does the current technology suggest AGI is coming. VCs are willing to take a $1B bet on exponential growth with a 500B upside. Us regular folk see that and are dumbfounded because AI is obviously not going to improve exponentially forever (literally nothing in the observed universe does) and you can already see the logarithmic improvement curve. That’s where the dismissive attitude comes from.
- jejeyyy77 2y ago
  "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.
  - dartos 2y ago
    You should read the entire comment. They also have the warchest to afford a $1B gamble. If the math worked out for me too, I’d probably invest even if I didn’t personally believe in it. Also investors aren’t super geniuses, they’re just people. I mean look at SoftBank and Adam Neuman… investors can get swept up in hype and swindled too.
  - obmelvin 2y ago
    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 it means they know what they are doing.
greener_grass 2y ago
> If AGI works, in any capacity or at any level, it will have a lot of big customers. This is wrong. The models may end up cheaply available or even free. The business cost will be in hosting and integration.
codingwagie 2y ago
I'm also confused by the negativity on here. Ilya had a direct role in creating the algorithms and systems that created modern LLMs. He pioneered the first deep learning computer vision models.
elAhmo 2y ago
Even with Ilya demonstrating his capabilities in those areas you mentioned, it seems like investors are simply betting on his track record, hoping he’ll replicate the success of OpenAI. This doesn’t appear to be an investment in solving a specific problem with a clear product-market fit, which is why the reception feels dismissive.
- trashtester 2y ago
  When Ilya was in Toronto, the breakthroughs came from Toronto. When Ilya was in Google, the breakthroughs came from Google. When Ilya was in OpenAI, the breakthroughs came from OpenAI. ....
kwant_kiddo 2y ago
I repeatedly keep seeing praise for Ilyas achievements as a scientist and engineer, but until ChatGPT OpenAI was in the shadow of DeepMind, and to my knowledge (I might be wrong) he has not been that much involved with ChatGPT? the whole LLM race seems deaccelerate, and all the hard problems about LLMs seems not do have had that much progress the last couple of years (?) In my naaive view I think a guy like David Silver the creator/co-lead of Alpha-Zero deserves more praise, atleast as a leader/scientist. He even have lectures about Deep RL after doing AlphaGo: https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/ https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/ He has no LinkedIn and came straight from the game-dev industry before learning about RL. I would put my money on him.
- dartos 2y ago
  I’m not optimistic about AGI, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due. Even assuming the public breakthroughs are the only ones that happened, the fact that openai was able to make an llm pipeline from data to training to production at their scale before anyone else is a feat of research and engineering (and loads of cash)
deleted 2y ago
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greenthrow 2y ago

I 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 ago
Except in this analogy you've already had success mining rocks that create supernatural results.
- greenthrow 2y ago
  Ilya is going for AGI, which no one has come close to. So I'd say it holds.
- dartos 2y ago
  Mining rocks that can spray colors is a far cry from granting wishes.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  supernatural results? my dude, I'd rather have a washing machine than chatgpt.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    I was speaking to the analogy being made (a wish granting rock), not chatgpt.

dartos 2y ago

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. Moreover you say: > 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. Which is absolutely true, but that doesn’t imply more breakthroughs are just around the corner, nor does the current technology suggest AGI is coming. VCs are willing to take a $1B bet on exponential growth with a 500B upside. Us regular folk see that and are dumbfounded because AI is obviously not going to improve exponentially forever (literally nothing in the observed universe does) and you can already see the logarithmic improvement curve. That’s where the dismissive attitude comes from.

jejeyyy77 2y ago
"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.
- dartos 2y ago
  You should read the entire comment. They also have the warchest to afford a $1B gamble. If the math worked out for me too, I’d probably invest even if I didn’t personally believe in it. Also investors aren’t super geniuses, they’re just people. I mean look at SoftBank and Adam Neuman… investors can get swept up in hype and swindled too.
- obmelvin 2y ago
  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 it means they know what they are doing.

greener_grass 2y ago

> If AGI works, in any capacity or at any level, it will have a lot of big customers. This is wrong. The models may end up cheaply available or even free. The business cost will be in hosting and integration.

codingwagie 2y ago

I'm also confused by the negativity on here. Ilya had a direct role in creating the algorithms and systems that created modern LLMs. He pioneered the first deep learning computer vision models.

elAhmo 2y ago

Even with Ilya demonstrating his capabilities in those areas you mentioned, it seems like investors are simply betting on his track record, hoping he’ll replicate the success of OpenAI. This doesn’t appear to be an investment in solving a specific problem with a clear product-market fit, which is why the reception feels dismissive.

trashtester 2y ago
When Ilya was in Toronto, the breakthroughs came from Toronto. When Ilya was in Google, the breakthroughs came from Google. When Ilya was in OpenAI, the breakthroughs came from OpenAI. ....

kwant_kiddo 2y ago

I repeatedly keep seeing praise for Ilyas achievements as a scientist and engineer, but until ChatGPT OpenAI was in the shadow of DeepMind, and to my knowledge (I might be wrong) he has not been that much involved with ChatGPT? the whole LLM race seems deaccelerate, and all the hard problems about LLMs seems not do have had that much progress the last couple of years (?) In my naaive view I think a guy like David Silver the creator/co-lead of Alpha-Zero deserves more praise, atleast as a leader/scientist. He even have lectures about Deep RL after doing AlphaGo: https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/ https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/ He has no LinkedIn and came straight from the game-dev industry before learning about RL. I would put my money on him.

dartos 2y ago
I’m not optimistic about AGI, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due. Even assuming the public breakthroughs are the only ones that happened, the fact that openai was able to make an llm pipeline from data to training to production at their scale before anyone else is a feat of research and engineering (and loads of cash)

deleted 2y ago

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