Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
If Ilya is sincere in his belief about safe superintelligence being within reach in a decade or so, and the investors sincerely believe this as well, then the business plan is presumably to deploy the superintelligence in every field imaginable. "SSI" in pharmaceuticals alone would be worth the investment. It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation. I'm not an economist, but since the valuation is $5bn, it stands to reason that evaluators believe there is at most a 1 in 400 chance of success?
> It could cure every disease humanity has ever known, which should give it at least a $2 trillion valuation.

The lowest hanging fruit aren't even that pie in the sky. The LLM doesn't need to be capable of original thought and research to be worth hundreds of billions, they just need to be smart enough to apply logic to analyze existing human text. It's not only a lot more achievable than a super AI that can control a bunch of lab equipment and run experiments, but also fits the current paradigm of training the LLMs on large text datasets.

The US Code and Code of Federal Regulations are on the order of 100 million tokens each. Court precedent contains at least 1000x as many tokens [1], when the former are already far beyond the ability of any one human to comprehend in a lifetime. Now multiply that by every jurisdiction in the world.

An industry of semi-intelligent agents that can be trusted to do legal research and can be scaled with compute power would be worth hundreds of billions globally just based on legal and regulatory applications alone. Allowing any random employee to ask the bot "Can I legally do X?" is worth a lot of money.

[1] based on the size of the datasets I've downloaded from the Caselaw project.

loading story #41455194
Let’s be real. Having worked at $tech companies, I’m cynical and believe that AGI will basically be used for improving adtech and executing marketing campaigns.
loading story #41453992
loading story #41470366
> It could cure every disease humanity has ever known

No amount of intelligence can do this without the experimental data to back it up.

loading story #41453936
loading story #41455116
I’m dubious about super intelligence. Maybe I’ve seen one too many sci-fi dystopian films but I guess yes, iif it can be done and be safe sure it’d be worth trillions.
loading story #41455234
loading story #41449862
loading story #41454875
loading story #41452927