“OpenAI Co-Founder Sutskever’s New Safety-Focused AI Startup SSI Raises $1 Billion”, 2024-09-04 (; similar):
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, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel.
The company declined to share its valuation but sources close to the matter said it was valued at $5 billion. The funding underlines how some investors are still willing to make outsized bets on exceptional talent focused on foundational AI research. That’s despite a general waning in interest towards funding such companies which can be unprofitable for some time, and which has caused several startup founders to leave their posts for tech giants.
Investors included top venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel. NFDG, an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI’s Chief Executive Daniel Gross, also participated.
“It’s important for us to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission, which is to make 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.
…Sutskever said his new venture made sense because he “identified a mountain that’s a bit different from what I was working on.”
…Unlike OpenAI’s unorthodox corporate structure, implemented for AI safety reasons but which made Altman’s ouster possible, SSI has a regular for-profit structure. SSI is currently very much focused on hiring people who will fit in with its culture. Gross said they spend hours vetting if candidates have “good character”, and are looking for people with extraordinary capabilities rather than overemphasizing credentials and experience in the field. “One thing that excites us is when you find people that are interested in the work, that are not interested in the scene, in the hype”, he added. 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. AI startups often work with companies such as Microsoft & Nvidia to address their infrastructure needs.
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.
Sutskever said he will approach scaling in a different way than his former employer, without sharing details.
“Everyone just says ‘scaling hypothesis’. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?” he said. “Some people can work really long hours and they’ll just go down the same path faster. It’s not so much our style. But if you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special.”