OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) raises an additional $2 billion at a funding round announced on April 11, following an earlier $1 billion fundraise, securing a total of $6 billion.
The fresh capital brings the startup’s valuation to $32 billion, over a sixfold increase from their previous funding round.
The investment was led by GreenOaks which shelled out $500 million for the round, with participation from other major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and DST Global. Alphabet and Nvidia have also backed the company, and Google Cloud has become a major infrastructure provider to the AI lab.
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SSI was founded in June 2024 by Sutskever, Apple’s former AI lead Daniel Gross, and noted AI researcher Daniel Levy. This happened shortly after Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024, after he appeared to play a role in a failed attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman. SSI’s cofounders said that the company had “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.” The product is still in the works with SSI’s website still in the works.
According to a PYMNTS report, the launch of Safe Superintelligence has reignited the debate over whether safe superintelligence without pressure from commercial interests was even possible.
“Critics of the superintelligence goal point to the current limitations of AI systems, which, despite their impressive capabilities, still struggle with tasks that require common sense reasoning and contextual understanding. They argue that the leap from narrow AI, which excels at specific tasks, to a general intelligence that surpasses human capabilities across all domains is not merely a matter of increasing computational power or data,” the report said.
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“While the goal of creating a safe and beneficial superintelligent AI remains a distant and controversial prospect, the work of researchers like Sutskever and his colleagues at SSI will likely shape the future of this rapidly advancing field, just as OpenAI’s achievements have done in recent years.”