Alphabet and Nvidia are investing in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a stealth mode AI startup co-founded by former Openai chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, sources told Reuters. The company was launched in June 2023 and has already become one of the highest-value AI startups, reaching an astounding $32 billion valuation in its latest funding round.
The funding round, led by Greenoaks, led by a $500 million contribution, also saw participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. This was following the previous $1 billion salary increase in September 2023, locking the SSI value at $5 billion.
Sutskever, who left Openai last year after an internal conflict over leadership, launched SSI with former Apple AI lead Daniel Gross and researcher Daniel Levy. The company has double headquarters in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.
SSI remains extremely secretive about its product roadmap, but is reportedly working on next-generation AI models designed to surpass the capabilities of current systems such as ChatGpt, Gemini and Claude.
In a parallel strategic move, Alphabet’s cloud computing arm has signed a deal to provide tensor processing units (TPUs) to SSI.
SSI reportedly favors TPU over Nvidia’s GPU. It has long dominated the AI chip market with a market share of over 80%. This preference could indicate a broader change in AI infrastructure, with Google offering both TPUs and Nvidia GPUs through its cloud platform to meet the new needs of the AI model development space.
Meanwhile, Google and Amazon continue to invest heavily in Anthropic, another AI rival that develops models with Amazon’s training and estimated chips.
SSI investments reflect the broader trend in cloud measures to acquire strategic stocks at AI Labs. Microsoft placed the chips on Openai, Amazon and Google for humanity, and Nvidia favored both Xai and Openai.
Each of SSIs bets on building models that go beyond language understanding, and aims to create reasoning-driven AI systems that ultimately outweigh human cognitive abilities.
