OpenAI Co-founder Sutskever's SSI in Speak to be Valued At $20 Bln,
SSI in speak with raise financing at $20 billion appraisal, up from $5 billion last September
SSI focuses on 'safe superintelligence' without any income yet
Sutskever's track record and SSI's unique method pique investor interest
By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong
Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, a synthetic intelligence start-up co-founded by OpenAI's former chief researcher Ilya Sutskever in 2015, remains in talks to raise funding at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, four sources informed Reuters.
That would quadruple the company's $5 billion appraisal from its last financing round in September, when it raised $1 billion from 5 investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and sciencewiki.science DST Global.
SSI's fundraising tests the capability of prominent AI ventures to continue to command premium appraisals following an industry-wide reappraisal triggered by Chinese start-up DeepSeek's unveiling of its inexpensive AI last month.
SSI, which has not created any revenue, has said its objective is to establish "safe superintelligence" that is smarter than people while aligned with human interests.
The company's discussions with existing and surgiteams.com new financiers are still in the early phases and terms could still alter, the sources said this week, who asked for privacy to discuss private matters. It was unclear how much money SSI was seeking to raise.
SSI, which was established in June with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not react to demands for comment. Sutskever's co-founders are Daniel Gross, who formerly led AI efforts at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI scientist.
SECRETIVE STARTUP
Beyond the brief description of the business's objectives for safe AI, very little is understood about the deceptive startup or its work. What has sustained interest among investors is Sutskever's credibility and the novel method he has said his group is dealing with.
In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to breakthroughs that underpin the investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early supporter of scaling, which indicates devoting vast quantities of calculating power and information to refining AI designs.
That principle was the foundation that resulted in 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 also early in seeing the possible ceiling of such an approach due to the dwindling pool of available information to train designs. Recognizing the significance of putting in resources in the inference phase, or the phase of AI when a trained design reasons, he the group that dealt with what would become OpenAI's most current series of thinking designs, setting a new research study instructions that has actually been extensively followed.
Explaining to financiers not to anticipate short-term windfalls, SSI has said it plans to "scale in peace" by insulating its development from short-term industrial pressures.
This sets it apart from other AI labs, consisting of OpenAI which started as a not-for-profit however shifted focus to commercial items after ChatGPT suddenly removed in 2022. It produced almost $4 billion in profits in 2015 and projection $11.6 billion in profits this year.
Little is openly learnt about SSI's technique. In a Reuters interview last year Sutskever, 38, said SSI was pursuing a brand-new research direction, calling it "a new mountain to climb", however shared couple of other details.
Fundraising for the so-called foundation model companies revealed no indications of slowing down. OpenAI remains in speak with double its appraisal to $300 billion, while rival Anthropic is completing a financing round that would value it at $60 billion.
Still, investors face fresh concerns about their outsized bet with the disruption from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which established open-source designs that equaled the top U.S. AI models at a fraction of the cost.
The appeal of DeepSeek knocked almost $600 billion off Nvidia's market capitalization in late January. But it has not prevented huge tech from raking ever greater investment in their AI infrastructures this year, according to current profits declarations.
(Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York, Kenrick Cai and Anna Tong in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Nia Williams)