SSI in speak to raise financing at $20 billion appraisal, up from $5 billion last September

SSI on ‘safe superintelligence’ without any income yet

Sutskever’s track record and SSI’s distinct method pique investor interest

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief researcher Ilya Sutskever last year, remains in speak with raise financing at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, four sources informed Reuters.

That would quadruple the company’s $5 billion appraisal from its last funding round in September, when it raised $1 billion from 5 financiers including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI’s fundraising tests the ability of high-profile AI endeavors to continue to command premium appraisals following an industry-wide reappraisal prompted by Chinese startup DeepSeek’s unveiling of its low-cost AI last month.

SSI, which has not produced any income, has said its objective is to develop “safe superintelligence” that is smarter than people while aligned with human interests.

The company’s conversations with existing and brand-new investors are still in the early phases and terms could still alter, the sources said today, who requested anonymity to discuss personal matters. It was unclear how much money SSI was looking for to raise.

SSI, which was founded in June with workplaces in Palo Alto and utahsyardsale.com Tel Aviv, did not react to ask for comment. Sutskever’s co-founders are Daniel Gross, who formerly led AI efforts at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a previous OpenAI scientist.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the general description of the business’s objectives for safe AI, very little is understood about the deceptive startup or its work. What has actually sustained interest among financiers is Sutskever’s reputation and the novel method he has said his group is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to developments that underpin the financial investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early advocate of scaling, which means dedicating large amounts of calculating power and data to refining AI models.

That idea was the foundation that resulted in generative AI advances like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, setting the course for a wave of tens of billions of dollars in financial investment in chips, data centers and energy.

Sutskever was likewise early in seeing the possible ceiling of such an approach due to the diminishing swimming pool of available information to train designs. Recognizing the value of putting in resources in the inference stage, or cadizpedia.wikanda.es the stage of AI when a trained design reasons, he established the group that worked on what would end up being OpenAI’s newest series of reasoning models, setting a new research study instructions that has been widely followed.

Explaining to investors not to expect short-term windfalls, SSI has said it means to “scale in peace” by insulating its development from short-term commercial pressures.

This sets it apart from other AI labs, including OpenAI which began as a not-for-profit but shifted focus to industrial items after ChatGPT unexpectedly removed in 2022. It produced almost $4 billion in revenue last year and projection $11.6 billion in revenue this year.

Little is publicly understood about SSI’s approach. In a Reuters interview in 2015 Sutskever, 38, said SSI was pursuing a brand-new research study direction, calling it “a new mountain to climb up”, however shared couple of other details.

Fundraising for the so-called foundation model companies shown no indications of slowing down. OpenAI remains in speak to double its appraisal to $300 billion, [smfsimple.com](https://www.smfsimple.com/ultimateportaldemo/index.php?action=profile