OpenAI Cofounder’s Safe Superintelligence Startup Raises $1 Billion

According to a Reuters exclusive, the startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) recently raised $1 billion in cash to develop its technology and systems. The new company was co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher, and Daniel Gross, an entrepreneur with experience in AI and a former key talent at Apple. SSI is focused on artificial intelligence safety and understanding and developing systems that “far surpass human capabilities” to prevent harm.

Big venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and DST Global were among the main investors along with other investment partnerships like NFDG.

“It’s important for us to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission, which is to make a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market,” said Gross, SSI’s Chief Executive.

The startup will use the money raised to buy computing power and also hire new talents—mainly researchers and engineers—to expand its structure. It currently has only 10 employees and will focus on growing a small and trusted team between Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. The current valuation of the company is unknown but anonymous sources told Reuters that the number is around $5 billion.

“Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time,” states the company on its very simple website, “We have started the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence. It’s called Safe Superintelligence Inc.” The statement was signed by the three cofounders on June 19 this year, after it was founded. They also invited more talents to join and shared the recent investment update reported by Reuters.

Other OpenAI cofounders and talents like Sutskever who also left OpenAI are developing new AI technologies. Just a few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy, a former researcher at OpenAI, launched a new company, Eureka Labs, an AI-native educational platform.