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

SSI focuses on ‘safe superintelligence’ without any income yet

Sutskever’s track record and SSI’s unique technique pique financier interest

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, a synthetic intelligence start-up co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief researcher Ilya Sutskever in 2015, remains in talks to raise funding at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, 4 sources informed Reuters.

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

SSI’s fundraising checks the capability of high-profile AI endeavors to continue to command premium appraisals following an industry-wide reappraisal triggered by Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s unveiling of its affordable AI last month.

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

The company’s conversations with existing and new financiers are still in the early stages and terms might still change, the sources said this week, who requested privacy to discuss personal matters. It was not clear just how much cash SSI was seeking to raise.

SSI, which was founded in June with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not react to requests for comment. Sutskever’s co-founders are Daniel Gross, who previously led AI initiatives at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI scientist.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the general description of the business’s goals for safe AI, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr not much is understood about the secretive start-up or its work. What has actually sustained interest amongst investors is Sutskever’s track record and the novel approach he has said his team is working on.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to advancements that underpin the investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early advocate of scaling, which suggests devoting vast amounts of computing power and data to refining AI models.

That principle was the structure that resulted in generative AI advances like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, setting the course for a wave of 10s of billions of dollars in investment in chips, data centers and energy.

Sutskever was likewise early in seeing the possible ceiling of such an approach due to the dwindling pool of available information to train designs. Recognizing the importance of putting in resources in the inference phase, or the phase of AI when a trained design reasons, he founded the group that dealt with what would become OpenAI’s latest series of thinking designs, setting a brand-new research direction that has been commonly followed.

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

This sets it apart from other AI labs, consisting of OpenAI which started as a nonprofit however shifted focus to business products after ChatGPT all of a sudden removed in 2022. It generated almost $4 billion in earnings last year and projection $11.6 billion in income this year.

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

Fundraising for the so-called structure design business shown no indications of decreasing. OpenAI remains in speak to double its appraisal to $300 billion, while rival Anthropic is settling a funding round that would value it at $60 billion.

Still, investors face fresh questions about their outsized bet with the interruption from Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which developed open-source designs that measured up to the leading U.S. AI designs at a portion of the cost.

The popularity of DeepSeek knocked nearly $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization in late January. But it has not hindered big tech from plowing ever greater investment in their AI facilities this year, according to current incomes declarations.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York, Kenrick Cai and Anna Tong in San Francisco