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

SSI concentrates on ‘safe superintelligence’ without any income yet

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

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, an intelligence start-up co-founded by OpenAI’s previous chief scientist Ilya Sutskever last year, remains in talks to raise funding at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, bphomesteading.com 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 investors consisting of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI’s fundraising evaluates the capability of prominent AI ventures to continue to command premium appraisals following an industry-wide reappraisal prompted by Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s unveiling of its affordable AI last month.

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

The business’s conversations with existing and brand-new investors are still in the early stages and terms might still alter, the sources said today, who asked for anonymity to discuss private matters. It was not clear just how much money SSI was seeking to raise.

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

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the cursory explanation of the business’s goals for safe AI, not much is understood about the secretive start-up or its work. What has sustained interest among investors is Sutskever’s track record and the novel approach he has said his team is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to developments that underpin the investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early supporter of scaling, which indicates devoting vast quantities of computing power and data to refining AI designs.

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

Sutskever was likewise early in seeing the potential ceiling of such an approach due to the decreasing swimming pool of available information to train models. Recognizing the value of putting in resources in the inference stage, or the stage of AI when a trained model draws conclusions, he founded the team that dealt with what would end up being OpenAI’s most current series of thinking models, setting a new research direction that has actually been extensively followed.

Explaining to investors not to anticipate 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 laboratories, consisting of OpenAI which started as a not-for-profit but shifted focus to industrial products after ChatGPT all of a sudden removed in 2022. It produced almost $4 billion in revenue last year and forecast $11.6 billion in earnings this year.

Little is openly understood about SSI’s technique. 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”, however shared few other details.

Fundraising for the so-called foundation design business revealed no indications of decreasing. OpenAI remains in talks to double its appraisal to $300 billion, while competing Anthropic is completing a financing round that would value it at $60 billion.

Still, financiers face fresh concerns about their outsized bet with the disruption from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which established open-source models that equaled the top U.S. AI models at a portion of the expense.

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

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