Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, is discussing a new funding round that could value the company at $20 billion - four times its previous valuation from September, despite having no revenue yet.
The enormous valuation suggests investors are betting on SSI's potential to develop transformative AI technology. Unlike other AI companies, SSI focuses solely on developing "safe superintelligence" without first creating commercial products like ChatGPT. The company remains in pure research mode until it achieves its ultimate goal of ASI.
A different path forward
This "ASI" focus likely influenced Sutskever's decision to leave his position as senior scientist at OpenAI in May 2024. His vision apparently didn't align with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's increasingly commercial direction.
The funding discussions are still in early stages, Reuters reports, and terms may change. Investors' strong interest stems largely from Sutskever's extensive AI research background.
At the NeurIPS AI conference in December, Sutskever discussed what he calls "peak data" - the idea that available AI training data is limited while computing power continues to grow. He compared training data to fossil fuels, suggesting it will eventually run out.
Sutskever sees several potential solutions: AI agents capable of independent thinking and reasoning, synthetic data generation, and increased computing power during inference. Other major AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Deepseek, are exploring similar approaches.
In November, Sutskever said the AI sector has entered a new "age of discovery," and while scaling remains important, he emphasized the need to "scale the right thing."
