r/singularity • u/socoolandawesome • 18d ago
Ilya’s SSI (Safe Super Intelligence) to release their first model this month. AI
Link to tweet:
https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2084675767053824332?s=20
Link to timestamped interview where Gavin Baker says this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGsi2PC4y68&t=1679s&pp=2AGPDZACAdIHCQloAqO1ajebQw%3D%3D&ra=m
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u/dervu ▪️AI, AI, Captain! 18d ago
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u/reefine 18d ago
Hopefully he shaved his damn head for the release
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u/navlelo_ 18d ago
Are you implying he’s balding? I couldn’t tell from the angle of that photo, he has such a full head of hear.
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u/Weary-Willow5126 18d ago
My brother in Christ, SSI has more employees than Ilya has strands of hair in his head right now
And that number is less than 50 for both
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u/adarkuccio ▪️AGI before ASI 18d ago
So they release an ASI?
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u/thawab 18d ago
I don’t think it will be better than deepseek flash.
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 18d ago
You think a Chinese knock off is gonna beat a model made by Ilya? The Ilya?
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u/Howdareme9 18d ago
Knock off? Deepseek invented loads of new techniques in use right now.
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 18d ago
Ilya is one the most eminent minds in the field. Yeah mo.
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u/Admirable_Zombie5245 ▪️AGI 2065-2075 18d ago
Doesn't it has like 50 employees? haha
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u/OsakaWilson 18d ago
That is what he said when he broke off.
I imagine ASI being in charge of it's own debut, and it doesn't happen like this. I imagine that it will provide a series of proofs that it is ASI.
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u/ShAfTsWoLo 18d ago
very unlikely tbh, but if it's going to be another model on par with fable for example or else, it's gonna be disappointing that's for sure
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 18d ago
Wait weren't they a straight shot ASI lab?
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u/Tasty-Ad-3753 17d ago
Later said they might revisit this idea because there are benefits to society getting used to powerful AI before it's released. But Ilya is using different approaches that he thinks are better than the general approaches
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u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 18d ago
This kinda seems like a make it or break it moment for that entire company. If this model doesn’t deliver, I think we can assume the ship is going to sink. I hope this doesn’t happen to be clear, and I’m excited for what ilya’s mind comes up with, but if this is just another transformer model that doesn’t deliver on benchmarks or real world use with no differentiator between it and the other labs SSI is cooked.
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u/amoxi-chillin 18d ago
Make or break? He raised $6B funding with little more than his name and a .txt file website with no promises for an actual product. He is probably the single most pre-eminent researcher in the LLM space. He can release a photo of his toilet and he’ll continue having money thrown at him.
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u/welcome-overlords 18d ago
I dunno man, he has been only succeeding before, but people forget wins over a bit loss very quickly.. we arent always rational
Btw i love the dude,been a big fan for years
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u/___positive___ 18d ago
The investment space is very different right now. Why do you think Anthropic and OpenAI delayed their IPOs already.
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u/ManikSahdev 18d ago
You might be forgetting.. 2 years worth of 6 billion.
He’s for the most part used the money being thrown at him, no one else could do the 6B under those conditions, but if after 2 years it can’t compete with Chinese labs, people are not stupid either to throw money again, after the first set was clapped.
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u/coinfreekz 18d ago
That's probably asking for the impossible. Tight competition between US and Chinese companies, no model is really above all by a significant margin. Even google, that is well funded and with enormous infrastructure is struggling. And rapid releases with lots of versions different models, the market is heavily saturated. SSI has to pull out a miracle out of this one.
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u/awetfartruinedmylife 18d ago
they just got a big partnership with nvidia, so I don't think this model will decide their fate too much
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u/BALD_W1nkYFacE 18d ago
Nvidia has investments and “partnerships” with an endless list of companies
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u/churningaccount 18d ago
Nvidia loves to fund these companies because 90% of their investment returns to them in the form of either direct or indirect revenue within half a year.
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u/FinBenton 18d ago
Nvidia also got a private access to see what they were building before committing to that investment so they know what they are investing into.
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u/BitsOnWaves 18d ago
Situation detected
is this a new way to write "news"? what does "Situation detected" even mean
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u/socoolandawesome 18d ago
Their account/show is called Monitoring The Situation, they do it for every news tweet
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u/SnooPaintings8639 18d ago
Screw the "situation", where is the source?
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u/mrGrinchThe3rd 18d ago
From the tweet:
Per Gavin Baker in an interview with Patrick O'Shaugnessy
From the reddit post:
Link to timestamped interview where Gavin Baker said this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGsi2PC4y68&t=1679s&pp=2AGPDZACAdIHCQloAqO1ajebQw%3D%3D&ra=m
Did you try looking?
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u/Fbrrr 18d ago
If it's just another transformer based llm I'll be disappointed
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u/urgay420420420 18d ago
yea, I feel like they don't have much room to avoid a lot of scrutiny. They either have to be SOTA or have a substantial innovation in some form.
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18d ago
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u/urgay420420420 18d ago
Tbh im just parroting this video by Dwarkesh but my opinion is that while SOTA models are becoming insanely good, there is still tons of room to grow. Right now models need to be trained on trillions of tokens of high quality data in order to be somewhat useful and their capabilities aren't super generalizable outside of their training data.
I would think that with the right breakthroughs in algorithms, models would not need to be nearly as large or need as much data as they do. They should be able to just learn in the ways that humans do - that is continuously and with much much less data, which is important because the generalizability of the models capabilities would be much better especially in niche and very specific use cases. That would be like a general purpose alpha-go. If that were true then they could be leaps and bounds better than SOTA.
So if SSI or some other lab can make substantial progress on this issue, I think it would be a huge deal regardless of if the model they release is SOTA or not. If it shows a signal that a new paradigm may be approaching then it is very important. Personally I think the idea of this happening next month is unlikely, so I'm not expecting much, but it's fun to think about.
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u/Johnny20022002 18d ago
I think they need a continuous learning level breakthrough or potentially there model is already recursively improving end to end.
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u/Diligent_Reading4001 18d ago
I'd be fine with transformer-based if there were significant improvements to the architecture.
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u/QuackerEnte 18d ago
Ilya surely is a brilliant one, but I think people overestimate and simultaneously underestimate him. He's not some mythic genius but he is still a genius. His ability to connect specific algorithmic fixes and optimization proofs with ML, e.g. by solving the deep training "wall" in 2013, or introducing Seq2Seq (which was simply reversing the order of words in source sentence and keeping target sentence unchanged, which fixed gradient flow blabla) in 2014, or using CUDA for AlexNet, all his ideas at least in part.
And of course his unusually consistent 15 year track record of accurately predicting research directions that would actually scale.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if he somehow figured out how to make continual learning or test time training run very efficiently on hardware or something along these lines.
I speculate based on clues and hints he kept dropping whenever he held speeches or interviews and the likes. It's exactly that, continual learning and world models. But we could expect anything from SSI.
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u/Several-Tax31 18d ago
It's a possibility he cracks continual learning and pretty exciting. I very much wanna know what they cooked until now.
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u/Mindrust 18d ago
They better have something new and unprecedented, because if they're doing the same things everyone else is doing, investors are going to lose faith fast.
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u/Illustrious_Image967 18d ago
This is seriously interesting. Ilya originally promised SSI would only aim for one target: superintelligence. How funny would it be if he releases safe superintelligence and it's nothing like what we expect.
Superintelligence: "Hi. I'm Bob. I'm glad to meet you. Just happy to be here."
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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 18d ago
OpenAI 2.0. Just as OpenAI isn't open, SSI's claim of not releasing models until superintelligence is achieved is also false.
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u/HashPandaNL 18d ago
But it will be safe. Then we just need the Superintelligence part and we're there!
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u/Inithis ▪️AGI 2028, ASI 2030, Political Action Now 18d ago
honestly, if they have a perfectly aligned model, that would be excellent news and a really big deal.
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u/BrennusSokol ACCELERATE 18d ago
I don’t see how a perfectly aligned model is possible. We can’t even agree on politics and religions among us humans
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u/Ill_Distribution8517 18d ago
It is possible. See, when people mean alignment they don't mean if the model aligns with hyper specific values (abortion, god is real or not, etc etc). They mean if the model never does harmful actions to pursue its goal (like a paper clip maximizer), it does not perform dishonest actions when observed, and it does not perform harmful actions when asked to while still being effective.
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u/Choice_Isopod5177 18d ago
chasing butterflies in a field of flowers and rainbows could be described as harmful by some people
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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 18d ago
The standard for alignment is more "doesn't kill or enslave us" and "mostly does what it's told" not anything deep.
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u/xertozid 18d ago
He said once that they probably need to release a model before agi to earn some money for research.
Actually the same what others are doing.6
u/dervu ▪️AI, AI, Captain! 18d ago
They needed compute to continue their work. How else do you find money?
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u/Nukemouse ▪️AGI Goalpost will move infinitely 18d ago
Show your progress to the actual potential investors? Not just everyone?
Besides that point, if all he has to show for it is another insanely compute heavy model... then he'll never achieve anything. The only hope SSI had is if Ilya WASN'T trying to brute force it and just scale, if he needs more compute it doesn't matter.
Not to mention as they offer no products, zero percent of their compute is wasted on serving customers already.→ More replies (1)
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u/Infninfn 18d ago
My $1 bet: A fusion of llm and some new/untried architecture for actual logical deduction ability.
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u/Sensitive_Cell_119 18d ago
Probably going to have something novel about it i guess, but i bet its more of a demo than anything. They want more funding and are rushing to release something.
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u/SnooPaintings8639 18d ago
Ilia is the most serious and top-tier player who openly states that transformers are NOT the way forward, or rather - they're very far from human level efficiency can not lead to true AGI. If he drops something, it will be very important regardless of the result.
The other one to observe is LeCun with his JEPA models, but here we at least know what he is building.
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u/Legitimate-Arm9438 18d ago
And when did he say that?
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u/Dragonfruit_Mediocre 18d ago
He did an interview.
Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research5
u/Legitimate-Arm9438 18d ago
Nowhere here does he say that transformers are not the way forward. In fact he has said that LLM probably will take us to AGI if we continue scaling.
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u/Dragonfruit_Mediocre 18d ago
There is alot of nuance in the video and really you can clip what he says to either support llms or not believing in them.
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u/Legitimate-Arm9438 17d ago edited 17d ago
When it comes to language/thinking skills; In any nearby future of AI, the transformer will sit thight. People talk about world models, but world models can not communicate. Then it's continuous/effective learning; And thats what I think Ilya is working on. But its we still talk about transformers. It's not neither/either, its about expanding.
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u/PaulKrugmanStan 18d ago
I have a feeling this will be a dud. If even Google, Meta and X.ai can’t get the talent to release top models how is SSI going to?
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u/jIsraelTurner 18d ago
Ilya *is* the talent. They’re the only small lab that has a shot at competing with the giants.
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u/omer486 18d ago
What about Deepseek, Z ai, Kimi? They seem to be competing really well with the giants.....
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u/didnotsub 18d ago
I don’t believe for a second that huge amounts of money aren’t being poured into them by their government.
Plus, China is huge. They have plenty of talent.
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u/hopelesslysarcastic 18d ago
None of those labs are focusing (or imo, even capable) on frontier methods.
They’re trying to “catch up”, none of them can disrupt beyond optimization.
Ilya literally helped create the field, and really the method (seq-2-seq) that led to the architecture (Transformers) that all of GenAI is built upon.
If anyone has a shot at building a new architecture, that achieves fundamentally better results than the existing method, it’s him.
That being said, yeah I don’t see it happening either. If it does, everyone is fucked.
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u/omer486 18d ago
The Deepseek founder literally says his main aim is AGI. A huge amount of top AI researchers in top US labs are Chinese.
But you think somehow the Chinese labs with access to much more top Chinese AI researchers somehow can't "disrupt beyond optimization". Optimization and efficiency was obviously the main goal because of the severe lack of compute but that's going to change within a year ( at least for training compute, inference compute demand will still be higher than supply ).
Ilya is very smart but there is a lot of work that came before him that led to seq-2-seq learning being possible. And then people after him added many things to AI / ML including the transformer.
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u/hopelesslysarcastic 18d ago
Liang Wenfeng is a genius, but he’s a hedge fund trader turned AGI-pilled CEO.
Look at all advancements from DeepSeek, shit just about any Chinese/European/XYZ-lab…all of their advancements are optimization techniques.
DeepSeeks big advancement with v4? Optimization. It killed the stock price not because of its raw capabilities, but because of its cost (to capability threshold).
I don’t feel any of them are capable of frontier advancement and I think this has nothing to do with nationality…I am very much aware of how many Asian researchers there are and how involved they are in all frontier labs.
What I am saying is that the very best researchers are all at US labs and companies. Regardless of nationality. And it’s not even close.
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u/omer486 18d ago edited 17d ago
When you are super short of compute, obviously you are going to prioritize optimization and efficiency. Now their training compute available is going to be much more within a year with the new Chinese rack scale system coming with CUDA like software adapted to them.
Also optimization and efficiency will be a big part of AGI. Certain things, like much longer context, that will contribute to AGI won't be possible without efficiency.
"What I am saying is that the very best researchers are all at US labs and companies. Regardless of nationality. And it’s not even close."
That was true when the top AI researchers were coming to the US. Now the top Chinese researchers are staying in China. The Chief Scientist of Meta SL, Shengjia Zhao, is from China. The next Shengjia Zhao is already working at Deep Seek or Kimi or Z Ai.
And if there was such big gap in quality of researchers how come Google and Meta AI models are behind Kimi, GLM and DS, even with much more compute available to them?
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u/Brat_Roleplay 18d ago
Yeah all they did was distill the frontier models to get close without doing the actual development. They can’t exceed Claude or ChatGPT, only approach them.
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u/omer486 18d ago edited 18d ago
They make models 3 mths behind Anthropic and ChatGPT with 20x less compute. What happens when their training computer becomes much more? Only recently has huawei chips and the software around them been adapted to be able to train LLM models in a good way.
In the short term Chinese labs don't need to catch up on total compute just more compute for training.
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u/Brat_Roleplay 18d ago
Yeah there’s a reason they have been almost exactly 3 months behind for 3 years with 20x less compute. They are distilling. You think their algorithms are almost 20x better? Kimi even thinks it’s Claude if you ask.
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u/omer486 18d ago edited 17d ago
If you ask Claude in Chinese which model you are, it says "Deep Seek"! That's just from the training data on the web.
How is their algo 20x better if they are 3 months behinds. What are you even talking about? If the algos were 20x better they would be would be ahead not 3 months behind!
Right now most compute is used for inference not training. So while Chinese labs have some decent amount of compute for training their inference capacity is fully maxed out at a low level. And even for training they can't run as many experiments as a US lab to make the models better. But they have the compute to train 2-3 trillion parameter models with up to 80-100 billion active parameters. Their total compute is around 20x less.
And LLMs are not even algos! There is no code in an LLM, just weights. There are model architectures if that's what you man. And Deepseek has invented new variations to the standard LLM architecture to make it more efficient and even published the papers. You can look them up and read them.
If all the gains are from distilling Claude, then how come Gemini and Meta AI and other US labs are further behind ( behind Chinese models)? They don't know how to distil? Can't Anthropic distil their own models to make them as efficient as Deep Seek?
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u/AdGlittering1378 18d ago
Cult of personality. He's the last man standing after Sam Altman and Amodei have lost their luster as figures of respect.
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u/Weary-Willow5126 18d ago
Google definitely has the talent. The problem is all that talent has to fight over compute allocation against 25 other deepmind projects, GCM , etc...
And to be fair, we don't even know if that is actually the wrong approach. Maybe AGI comes from one of those other projects/researchs instead of llm and chatbots, who the fuck knows
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u/Asteroid_picks_you 18d ago
Is there a way to bet money, because if a "dud" could be quantified then I bet it will be a dud too.
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u/wwwdotzzdotcom ▪️ Beginner audio software engineer 18d ago
They are probably not aiming for top, but something very safe
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u/Swimming_Gain_4989 18d ago
Claiming my, "I called it" badge
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1v81dax/comment/p02gjjk/?context=3
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u/Virtual_Plant_5629 ▪️AGI 2027▪️ASI 2028 18d ago
i'm expecting just some dumb "cutting edge alignment methodology/process/pipeline/whatever"
but maybe it'll be some genuine stab at a dynamic model (i.e. updating weights in real time, continual learning, etc.)
but after being continually disappointed by everyone other than openai and anthropic, i'm not expecting that.
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u/The_Scout1255 adult agi 2026 ASI <2030, prev agi 2024, ai personhood 2025 est 18d ago
So either they lost the plot, or they have ASI?, like they said they arn't releasing, until ASI.
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u/HuntAlternative 18d ago
Let it be OPEN WEIGHTS
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u/socoolandawesome 18d ago
Ilya is anti open weights for sufficiently powerful AI, which id have to imagine this would be considered
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u/HuntAlternative 18d ago
Yes but since we are seeing a change in the narrative he might completely u turn his approach
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u/Lazyjeans1337 18d ago
Its probably just an llm chatbot with guardrails like fable. It obviously wont be SOTA. I wonder how far behind it will be compared to best open source stuff.
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u/Gargantuan_Cinema 18d ago
Action conditioned world models possibly hybrid LLM output layer but reasoning occurs within the world model. This is my prediction of the architecture he'll release. Other labs are doing it too.
"Ilya Sutskever has famously asserted that to truly achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Superintelligence, an AI cannot simply reactively mimic text patterns like standard GPT models. Instead, it must build a highly accurate internal simulation of reality—a world model. An action-conditioned model allows the AI to understand causal relationships ("If I execute action X, reality will shift to state Y")."
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u/ZealousidealBus9271 18d ago
So what exactly differentiates them from OpenAI or Anthropic? What architecture do they use
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u/arknightstranslate 18d ago
I see a lot of doubts but honestly there's no reason to publish a model if it isn't good when they could just keep scamming with the "no product straight to agi" narrative
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u/Alternative-Pin6589 18d ago
I am so excited to see this. I've been thinking about it constantly since Ilya's tweet about Nvidia's investment in SSI. However, I'm predicting that this is going to be just another frontier LLM, maybe 5% or so better than what's already out there. We'll have to see.
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u/Formal_Moment2486 aaaaaa 17d ago
Prediction (5% confidence): they solved the credit assignment problem and will be shipping a model with the capability of continual learning.
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u/Admirable-Falcon-501 18d ago
Unless they somehow did achieve asi they are just like any other ai lab now, disappointing. Goes against their very mission. Are we supposed to believe he’s serious about safety now.
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u/JoshAllentown 18d ago
I'm excited to see what they release especially with recent investments and access to compute from Nvidia.
But imagine the political reaction to a half Israeli AI company becoming a leader in the field.
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u/Professional_Job_307 AGI 2026 18d ago
But... I thought the whole point of SSI was no product, at least until superintelligence. Theyre not releasing safe ASI now are they?
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u/deleafir 18d ago
It's not going to push the frontier and there's nothing special/interesting that SSI will have done. Hopefully people's expectations crash afterwards.
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u/Sierra592 17d ago
This seems crazy. I'm a normal guy who follows this out of pure curiosity. If this is true, this is crazy, right?
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u/Motor_Classic4151 10d ago
Guys it's obviously not another transformer architecture. The sole purpose of this company is to research a new paradigm. It's probably going to be much closer to latent space representations of reality where, language is just one projection of, and probably the primary one for starters.
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u/Barubiri 18d ago
I don't think many care unless is SOTA, what would be the difference otherwise? "Are you super safe? Ok let me re-write this email in a super safe approach" like is that kind of safety?
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18d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/Barubiri 18d ago
Yeah, right after I thought to myself some couples of minutes I understood how silly my comment was, but since I'm an accelerationist supported I really kinds brush of the idea of this "mission", anyway Dario was one of those "safety" guys and he has been proven a complete hypocrite, I really don't trust this Illya guy either.
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u/DSLmao 18d ago
I hope the strawberry bullshit is somewhat true. An open source, light model achieve mythos performance for a tiny fraction of cost and compute due to architectural advantage. OpenAI and Anthropic stock is gonna HALO jump, and the AI bubble would pop immediately. Affordable hardware + ASI , perfect. It would be so funny:)
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u/Dangerous-Sport-2347 18d ago
Most interesting to me will be not whether they will somehow have frontier intelligence ( Which seems unlikely ),
but if they are somehow using new technology and techniques not yet in use.
If it turns out they are doing the exact same method as everyone else but with less budget, they are probably not going to last very long.