Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an A.I. startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has no plans to release a product anytime soon. But that doesn’t seem to matter to investors, who are pouring $2 billion into the company through a new funding round that values it at a staggering $30 billion, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The sky-high valuation vaults SSI into a select group of well-funded A.I. startups—an impressive feat for a company with no clear product roadmap. Instead of pushing out A.I. tools and features like its competitors, the startup is solely focused on researching and developing an advanced form of the emerging technology with capabilities far exceeding those of humans.
Sutskever’s reputation is SSI’s primary selling point for investors, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter. The 38-year-old researcher was born in Russia, raised in Israel and studied in Canada under A.I. academic Geoffrey Hinton. He subsequently joined Google (GOOGL) before leaving in 2015 for OpenAI to lead the development of ChatGPT. He served as OpenAI’s chief scientist and a board member.
Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, described Sutskever as “the linchpin for OpenAI being successful” in a 2023 interview.
Sutskever’s standing in OpenAI became shakey in 2023 when he led an unsuccessful ouster of CEO Sam Altman. In May of last year, Sutskever left OpenAI to launch SSI with Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI staffer, and investor Daniel Gross.
Sutskever’s new venture has attracted investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks Capital, the latter of which is leading SSI’s newest funding round. The startup’s new valuation marks a six-fold increase from just five months ago.
An air of secrecy
A mission statement on SSI’s otherwise barren website highlights its goal to safely build a type of A.I. it refers to as “superintelligence.” This pursuit is its “singular focus,” says the startup, one sheltered from the commercial pressures other A.I. developers face.
Little else is known about the company. Candidates interviewing for the startup are told to put their phones in Faraday cages, a container that blocks electromagnetic waves, before entering the office, according to the Journal. Current employees are also reportedly advised against mentioning the startup on their LinkedIn profiles, making it difficult to identify who actually work there. The Israeli newspaper, the Globes, reported that the company’s Israel team recently brought on Tel Aviv University professor Yair Carmon, former Google staffer Yaron Brodsky and Technion graduates Shahar Papini and Nitzan Tor. SSI currently has about 20 employees, according to Pitchbook.
Compared to artificial general intelligence (A.G.I), a form of A.I. that is as smart as humans, superintelligence will be far more capable, said Sutskever during a 2023 panel. “Without question it’s going to be unbelievably powerful,” he claimed. “If it is used well, if we navigate the challenges that superintelligence poses, we could radically improve the quality of life.”
<