Ilya Sutskever's new AI super-intelligence startup raises a billion dollars. Unclear what they actually do. - eviltoast
reuters.com
www.reuters.com

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-safety-focused-ai-startup-ssi-raises-1-billion-2024-09-04/

http://web.archive.org/web/20240904174555/https://ssi.inc/

I have nothing witty or insightful to say, but figured this probably deserved a post. I flipped a coin between sneerclub and techtakes.

They aren’t interested in anything besides “superintelligence” which strikes me as an optimistic business strategy. If you are “cracked” you can join them:

We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    29·
    4 months ago

    ah yeah, 10 employees and “worth” $5 billion, utterly normal bubble shit

    Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT.

    but don’t sweat it, the $1 billion they raised is going straight to doing shit that doesn’t fucking work but does fuck up the environment, trying to squeeze more marginal performance gains out of systems that plateaued when they sucked up all the data on the internet (and throwing money at these things not working isn’t even surprising, given a tiny amount of CS knowledge)

    • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      4 months ago

      I don’t get it. If scaling is all you need, what does a “cracked team” of 5 mean in the end? Nothing?

      What’s, the different between super intelligence being scaling, and super intelligence, being whatever happens? Can someone explain to me the difference between what is and what SUPER is? When someone gives me the definition of super intelligence as “the power to make anything happen,” I always beg, again, “and how is that different precisely from not, that?”

      The whole project is tautological.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 months ago

        I’m just amused that their scaling program doesn’t scale properly. Due to the hungry hungry AI needing more and more data.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        4 months ago

        Superintelligence is an AI meaningfully beyond human capability.

        It pretty obviously can’t be achieved by brute forcing something already way past diminishing returns, though.

        • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
          41·
          4 months ago

          I’m actually, not convinced that AI meaningfully beyond human capability actually makes any sense, either. The most likely thing is that after stopping the imitation game, an AI developed further would just… have different goals than us. Heck, it might not even look intelligent at all to half of human observers.

          For instance, does the Sun count as a super intelligence? It has far more capability than any human, or humanity as a whole, on the current time scale.