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OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has raised $1 billion from investors including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz for a brand new company that’s developing “secure” models for artificial intelligence.
The deal values the three-month-old company, which currently has no product, at about $5 billion, in line with an individual accustomed to the matter.
Sutskever's startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), will invest the brand new investment in computing resources to develop its model and recent employees to affix its team of 10. The former OpenAI chief scientist founded the corporate together with serial AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, in addition to Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.
“We have identified a brand new mountain to climb that’s just a little different from what I even have worked on before. We usually are not attempting to go down the identical path faster. By doing something otherwise, it becomes possible to do something special,” Sutskever told the Financial Times.
The company develops cutting-edge AI models and goals to challenge more established rivals resembling Sutskever's former employer OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI. OpenAI is currently in talks with investors to boost multi-billion dollars at a valuation of over $100 billion, while Anthropic and xAI were each valued at just below $20 billion in funding rounds earlier this 12 months.
While these firms are all developing AI models with a big selection of consumer and business applications, SSI says it is concentrated on “making a direct path to secure superintelligence.”
“It's essential for us to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission. Our mission is to maneuver directly toward secure superintelligence and, specifically, to take a position a number of years in research and development of our product before we bring it to market,” Gross, chief executive of SSI, told Reuters, which first reported the news.
Sutskever left OpenAI in May after leading a failed coup against CEO Sam Altman. Sutskever's team – whose principal concern was achieving “alignment” and ensuring that AI systems that surpass human intelligence act within the human interest – was also disbanded.
A senior executive at OpenAI said Sutskever's departure was because of disagreements over how best to scale systems to realize insights while the corporate focuses on shorter-term goals.
SSI is currently looking for employees with AI expertise in a competitive job market. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
“We are assembling a lean, world-class team of the world's best engineers and researchers, focused exclusively on SSI,” the corporate's website states. “We are offering you the chance to perform your life's work and help solve a very powerful engineering challenge of our time.”
