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OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has raised $1bn from investors including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz for a new business building “safe” artificial intelligence models.
The deal values the 3-month old company, which currently has no product, at around $5bn, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Sutskever’s start-up, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), will spend the new investment on computing resources to develop its model and new staff to join his 10-person team. The former OpenAI chief scientist founded the company alongside serial AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, as well as Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.
“We’ve identified a new mountain to climb that’s a bit different from what I was working on previously. We’re not trying to go down the same path faster. If you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special,” Sutskever told the Financial Times.
The company is building cutting-edge AI models and aiming to challenge more established rivals including Sutskever’s former employer OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI. OpenAI is currently in talks with investors about raising billions of dollars at a valuation of more than $100bn, while Anthropic and xAI were both valued at close to $20bn in funding rounds earlier this year.
While those companies are all developing AI models with wide consumer and business applications, SSI said it is focused on “building a straight shot to safe superintelligence”.
“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,” Gross, SSI’s chief executive, told Reuters, which first reported the news.
Sutskever left OpenAI in May after leading a failed coup against chief executive Sam Altman. Sutskever’s team — which was focused on “alignment”, ensuring that AI systems that surpass human intelligence will act in the human interest — was also disbanded.
One executive at OpenAI said Sutskever’s exit was due to a difference of opinion on how best to scale systems to gain intelligence when the company was focused on more near-term goals.
SSI is now looking to hire in a competitive labour market for those with AI expertise. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
“We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else,” the company said on its website. “We offer an opportunity to do your life’s work and help solve the most important technical challenge of our age.”
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