SSI in talks to raise funding at $20 billion appraisal, up from $5 billion last September

SSI focuses on ‘safe superintelligence’ with no earnings yet

Sutskever’s performance history and SSI’s distinct method pique financier interest

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, a synthetic intelligence startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in 2015, remains in talk with raise financing at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, four sources told 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 checks 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 affordable AI last month.

SSI, which has not produced any revenue, has said its objective is to establish “safe superintelligence” that is smarter than human beings while lined up with human interests.

The business’s discussions with existing and brand-new investors are still in the early phases and terms could still alter, the sources said this week, who requested privacy to go over private matters. It was unclear just how much cash SSI was looking for to raise.

SSI, which was founded in June with workplaces in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not respond to ask for remark. Sutskever’s co-founders are Daniel Gross, who previously led AI efforts at Apple, fishtanklive.wiki and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the brief explanation of the business’s objectives for safe AI, championsleage.review very little is known about the secretive start-up or its work. What has sustained interest among financiers is Sutskever’s credibility and the novel method he has said his group is working on.

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

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

Sutskever was also early in seeing the potential ceiling of such a method due to the diminishing pool of available information to train models. Recognizing the significance of putting in resources in the inference stage, or the phase of AI when a trained design reasons, he established the group that worked on what would end up being OpenAI’s most current series of reasoning models, setting a brand-new research study instructions that has been extensively followed.

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

This sets it apart from other AI labs, consisting of OpenAI which began as a nonprofit but shifted focus to commercial products after ChatGPT unexpectedly removed in 2022. It produced nearly $4 billion in earnings last year and forecast $11.6 billion in revenue this year.

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

Fundraising for the so-called foundation model business revealed no signs of slowing down. OpenAI remains in talks to double its appraisal to $300 billion, while rival Anthropic is completing a funding round that would value it at $60 billion.

Still, investors deal with fresh questions about their outsized bet with the interruption from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which developed open-source models that matched the leading U.S. AI models at a fraction of the expense.

The appeal of DeepSeek knocked almost $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization in late January. But it has actually not discouraged big tech from raking ever greater financial investment in their AI infrastructures this year, according to recent incomes statements.

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