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OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has raised $2bn for his artificial intelligence start-up in a deal which values the year-old company at $32bn though it currently has no product.
Sutskever, who left OpenAI last year after a failed coup against chief executive Sam Altman, launched Safe Superintelligence last June with Daniel Gross, who led Apple’s AI efforts, and Daniel Levy, an investor and AI researcher.
The funding round underscores investors’ keen appetite for bankrolling AI start-ups led by prominent researchers or talented engineers. That appetite shows little sign of diminishing, even against the backdrop of economic tumult in the US.
Prominent venture capital firms participated in the latest fundraising, including Greenoaks — which led the round with $500mn — as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, said multiple people familiar with the matter. SSI last raised $1bn at a $5bn valuation in September.
SSI has set out to create AI models that are dramatically more powerful and more intelligent than current cutting-edge models from rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. It has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
The company has given few details about how it intends to beat those better-funded rivals, but Sutskever told the Financial Times last year that he and the team had “identified a new mountain to climb that’s a bit different from what I was working on previously”.
The group has been tight-lipped even with its investors, said multiple familiar people, however, three people close to the company said it was working on unique ways of developing and scaling AI models.
Currently, large language models can synthesise and regurgitate data. While they are improving their ability to provide considered answers and perform chains of tasks, they have not been able to surpass human intelligence. People close to the company said SSI is focused on this advancement.
Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and served as the San Francisco group’s chief scientist when it launched AI models and products, including chatbot ChatGPT, which kicked off the recent AI investment boom.
He left OpenAI in May and his team — which was focused on “alignment”, ensuring that AI systems that surpass human intelligence will act in the human interest — was also disbanded.
Former colleague and ex-OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati has also launched an artificial intelligence start-up called Thinking Machines Lab in February. The product and research organisation aims to make “AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable”. It is reportedly raising a similar-sized round.
SSI declined to comment.
