Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new startup from OpenAI founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1 billion to develop safe artificial general intelligence systems, company executives told Reuters.
Sutskever said in June that SSI would open offices in the United States and Israel, but he has not disclosed further details on the matter over the past three months. Sutskever calls the AI AGI, or superintelligence, an AI system that learns on its own and develops human-like and superhuman capabilities.
According to a Reuters report, SSI has 10 employees and with the new funding the company will buy powerful computers and hire a small, highly-trusted team of researchers and engineers based between Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. The report adds that the company is valued at $5 billion even before it develops a product or launches a beta version.
According to Reuters, investors in SSI include venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel, while NFDG, an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI’s Israeli CEO Daniel Gross, also participated.
Sutskever resigned from OpenAI — which developed ChatGPT — earlier this year over a dispute with the company’s management and executives over the future direction of AI. He is considered a conservative on the future role of AI and the risks it poses to humanity. The disagreement between Sam Altman and Sutskever is thought to have centered around Altman’s desire to take the company in commercial directions that do not take into account the limitations of the technology. Sutskever initially ousted Altman last November, but Altman quickly returned to the company after pressure from investors and Sutskever stepped down six months later.
Sutskever surprisingly told Reuters that SSI was founded as a commercial company, unlike OpenAI, which was a non-profit. He said he had “identified a slightly different mountain than what I was working on.”
“It is important for us to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission, which is to achieve our immediate goal of safe AI, and especially to spend two years researching and developing our product before bringing it to market,” Gross told Reuters.
Gross added that they spend hours checking candidates’ “character and character,” and that they look for people with exceptional abilities rather than qualifications and experience in the field. “One of the things that excites us is when we find people who are interested in the work, not the spectacle or the noise.”
“Some people might work long hours and then do the same thing faster,” Sutskever said. “That’s not our style. But if you do something different, you can do something special.”
Sutskever, who was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel when he was five years old before moving to Canada 10 years later, founded SSI with Gross, who previously led Apple’s AI initiatives, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.
This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on September 4, 2024.
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