Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the startup launched just three months ago by Canadian OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, has closed $1 billion USD in funding.
SSI confirmed the fundraising in an update on its website, which noted investors included NFDG, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. Notably, NFDG is an investment partnership run by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and SSI’s CEO and co-founder Daniel Gross.
As first reported by Reuters, this deal values the startup, which is looking to develop a lab for safe artificial intelligence (AI) development, at $5 billion USD, though SSI declined to disclose its valuation to Reuters.
Per Reuters, SSI will use the proceeds to purchase compute power, as well as scale its currently 10-person team. The company plans to split its researchers and engineers between Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Many AI startups remain unprofitable due to the immense costs of training their models, and many have focused on raising venture capital to acquire the necessary compute to scale their models and accelerate product development. This high cost of compute is pushing some startups to consider selling to or merging with larger companies. Canadian AI giant Cohere has closed several large rounds of financing in a bid to increase its computational capacity.
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SSI launched publicly in June of this year. In addition to Sutskever, SSI is also founded by principal scientist Daniel Levy, a former technical staff member at OpenAI, and CEO Gross, Apple’s former AI lead. According to Sutskever’s LinkedIn, he will serve as both co-founder and chief scientist at SSI.
While SSI is an American company, Sutskever is a Canadian citizen who studied under AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton while attending the University of Toronto. Sutskever also built AlexNet, a neural network focused on image processing, in partnership with Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky. AlexNet sold to Google in 2013.
Sutskever was one of several high-ranking employees at OpenAI who left the company following internal concerns that the ChatGPT creator was incapable of handling the safety risk of AI.
Developing AI safely is the core focus of SSI. On its website, the startup bills itself as a safety-first organization, noting it wants to “advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead.”