Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup from OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, has raised $2 billion in investment without having an MVP yet. The deal values the company at $32 billion, the Financial Times reports.
Investment details
- The round was led by Greenoaks, which invested $500 million, as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Citing its sources, Reuters writes that Nvidia and Google’s parent company also participated.
- Also this week, Alphabet, which has its own AI models, announced an agreement under which its cloud computing division will provide SSI with access to TPUs (tensor processing units), the company’s own chips for processing artificial intelligence tasks.
- Previously, Google used TPUs exclusively for internal purposes. However, the deal to sell a large number of chips to SSI is an example of a strategy to expand sales to external customers.
- Artificial intelligence developers have historically preferred GPUs from Nvidia, which owns more than 80% of the AI chip market. But according to two sources, SSI is now using TPUs instead of GPUs.
- The last time Sutskever’s startup raised $1 billion in September, it was valued at $5 billion. The company aims to create AI models that are much more powerful and intelligent than the advanced developments of competitors OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
About Sutskever
Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in May last year after the incident involving the firing and reinstatement of the company’s CEO, Sam Altman. Sutskever’s AI security unit was subsequently disbanded.
His former colleague and CTO Mira Murati also recently left the company to launch her own startup, Thinking Machines Lab, which develops more understandable and accessible AI systems. Her company recently raised $1 billion at a $9 billion valuation.
Ilya Sutskever was born in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky in Soviet times). He immigrated to Israel with his family at the age of five and lived in Jerusalem until the age of 16, when the family moved to Canada.
In 2012, he joined a research company that was acquired by Google a year later, and Sutskever was hired as a researcher at Google Brain. In late 2015, he left Google to become the co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.