OpenAI Co-Founder’s Safety-Focused AI Startup SSI Raises $1 Billion

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion in funding to help develop safe artificial intelligence (AI) systems that far surpass human capabilities, company executives told Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu, and Anna Tong of Reuters.

SSI declined to share its valuation, but sources close to the matter said it was valued at $5 billion. I Photo: Stanford University HAI

SSI, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. It will focus on building a small, highly trusted team of researchers and engineers, split between Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

The company declined to share its valuation, but sources close to the matter said it was valued at $5 billion.

The funding highlights how some investors are still willing to make outsized bets on exceptional talent focused on foundational AI research, despite a general decline in interest in funding such companies, which can be unprofitable for some time.

This has caused several startup founders to leave their posts for tech giants.

Investors in SSI include top venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. NFDG, an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI’s Chief Executive Daniel Gross, also participated.