less than 3 months after its establishment, the new company of the former chief scientist of openai received $1 billion in financing
2024-09-05
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less than three months after its establishment, ilya's new company received $1 billion in financing.
on september 4, local time, ssi (safe superintelligence), a new company founded by ilya sutskever, co-founder and former chief scientist of openai, announced that it had received $1 billion in financing. investors included nfdg (a joint venture between former github ceo knight friedman and ssi co-founder daniel gross), a16z, sequoia capital, dst global and sv angel. at the same time, the company's valuation also reached $5 billion.
ilya also forwarded the financing news and posted: "the mountain has been confirmed, it's time to start climbing."
according to foreign media reports, ssi currently has 10 employees and plans to use the financing to purchase computing power and recruit top talent. it will focus on building a small team of researchers and engineers.
“it’s important to us to have investors who understand, respect and support our mission to move directly into secure superintelligence, especially spending several years in r&d before bringing a product to market,” gross said.
according to gross, ssi spends hours vetting candidates for "good character" and looks for people with extraordinary abilities, rather than overemphasizing qualifications and experience in the field.
ssi said it plans to work with cloud providers and chip companies, but has not yet decided which companies to work with.
ilya said that he would take a different approach to scaling than openai, but did not disclose details. he said: "everyone is just talking about scaling assumptions. but everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?"
in may this year, ilya resigned from openai. on june 20, he announced the establishment of a new company, ssi, saying that the new company will be committed to the pursuit of safe super intelligence, "with only one focus, one goal and one product. we will achieve this goal through revolutionary breakthroughs with a small and capable team." the company was co-founded by ilya, gross, and daniel levy. gross is a former apple executive and y-combinator partner, and levy is a former openai researcher.
it is worth mentioning that openai has recently been exposed to be preparing for a new round of us$1 billion financing. investors include thrive capital, microsoft, apple and nvidia. this financing will make openai's valuation exceed us$100 billion.
in addition, openai's "strawberry" project was also revealed to be launched as early as this fall. the "strawberry" project was previously called "q*", which was the cause of the "palace fight" at openai and the sudden dismissal of ceo sam altman. the incident ended with altman returning to the company and reorganizing the board of directors, and ilya disappeared from the board of directors.
at the time, sources said murati told employees that a letter about a breakthrough at q* (pronounced q-star) ai prompted the board to take action.
openai’s progress on q* has led some inside the company to believe it could be their breakthrough toward finding “superintelligence,” or agi, which openai defines as “an ai system smarter than a human.”
whether ilya really saw q* has always been a focus of attention. ultraman has been asked this question many times in public interviews, and he has repeatedly expressed his love and respect for ilya.
after ilya left openai, people once again started thinking about ai safety. openai has also seen continuous personnel changes since then. a few hours after ilya announced his resignation, jan leike, the head of openai's core security team "super alignment", resigned. in august, openai president greg brockman said he would take a vacation until the end of the year, co-founder john schulman jumped to competitor anthropic, and chatgpt head peter deng was also reported to have resigned.
the paper reporter qin sheng
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