Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI), the firm started by Ilya Sutskever, has received backing from Alphabet, Nvidia, and other funders, Reuters has reported. Sutskever left OpenAI following the reinstatement of Sam Altman after he was ousted briefly. The new company he formed, SSI, has been extremely secretive so far with the website still displaying the initial announcement from June 2024.
When Reuters asked about the terms of the investment, spokespeople from Nvidia, Alphabet, and SSI all refused to comment on the matter. The funding is only known because of an anonymous source who leaked the details.
When SSI finally gets around to announcing a product, the funding by Google and Nvidia could ultimately give those firms access to the products. Microsoft backed OpenAI and until it developed its own Phi LLM, it relied heavily on OpenAI to power Copilot. We could see these tech giants get access in a similar way.
In addition to giving its financial support, Google Cloud announced that “Safe Superintelligence is partnering with Google Cloud to use TPUs to accelerate its research and development efforts toward building a safe, superintelligent AI.” Typically, AI has been powered by Nvidia GPUs, so this is an interesting shift.
Darren Mowry from Google said that its TPUs were initially used in-house, but lately, it has been offering the chips to external companies, helping it raise revenues, justifying the cost of development. Nvidia’s stock price has rocketed over the last few years thanks to its dominant position in AI, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Alphabet’s TPUs are garnering interest.
While we don’t know a lot about SSI right now, sources that spoke to Reuters said that Greenoaks has valued the company at $32 billion. Reuters put this valuation down to the fact that Sutskever has a good track record of predicting the next big thing in AI.
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