Google and Nvidia said to back OpenAI co-founder Sutskever’s safety startup

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the secretive AI startup launched by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, has attracted $2 billion in capital from investors, including Google parent Alphabet and US chip giant Nvidia.

According to a report by Reuters, the investments are part of a financing round that values the AI startup at a staggering $32 billion. Sutskever, who also served as OpenAI’s chief scientist, launched SSI back in June, together with Daniel Gross, a serial startup entrepreneur and former AI lead at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former member of the technical staff at OpenAI.

Since coming out of stealth, SSI, which operates out of Silicon Valley and has a research lab in Tel Aviv, hasn’t yet presented any technology or product. The secretive startup has in recent months focused on raising funds to continue to expand and build its team in Tel Aviv, hiring top engineers, and recently relocating to new offices, as well as building a small team in California’s Palo Alto.

Back in September, SSI raised $1 billion in cash at a company valuation of $5 billion to help develop systems that can figure out how to create a safe environment for “superintelligent” AI systems that are smarter than humans.

“Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” the startup’s mission statement said. “We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.”

The most recent financing round was led by venture capital firm Greenoaks, with a $500 million capital injection. Other investors included top venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. SSI’s current investors also include Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel, and NFDG, an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman.

Early last week, Alphabet, which builds its own AI models, announced that its cloud computing arm Google Cloud will sell SSI access to tensor processing units (TPUs), its in-house AI chips. SSI is partnering with Google Cloud to deploy its AI chips and support its “research and development efforts toward building a safe, superintelligent AI,” the tech giant said.

OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman (center) and Ilya Sutskever (right) on a panel at Tel Aviv University, June 5, 2023. (Chen Galili)

Russian-born Sutskever, who grew up in Jerusalem and moved to Canada with his family at the age of 16, decided last year to leave OpenAI, which he set up together with CEO Sam Altman in 2015 as a research and development lab with a mission to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity. Sutskever and Altman are the creators of generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.