Safe Superintelligence, the artificial intelligence company founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, is raising more than $1 billion in new funding. That money will bring Safe Superintelligence’s valuation to more than $30 billion, according to a report. The company has not yet generated any revenue and does not expect to soon.
Greenoaks Capital Partners led a new funding round with a planned investment of $500 million in Safe Superintelligence, Bloomberg reported on Feb. 7. The report added that talks are ongoing. Safe Superintelligence has a previous valuation of $5 billion after it raised funds from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Superintelligence doesn’t exist yet
“This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then,” Sutskever told Bloomberg in June. Superintelligence is understood to be the next step after artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is AI with the full cognitive skills of humans. Current AI research is approaching AGI but has not yet achieved it. Superintelligence would be vastly more capable than humans. Sutskever said safe superintelligence aligns high-powered AI with human best interests.
Superintelligence has a lot of people worried
Concern about the misuse of AI was widespread following the public debut of ChatGPT. An open letter urging a pause on AI research was signed by over 33,000 people in March, and former and current OpenAI staff signed a similar letter in June.
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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned against the development of superintelligence in an X post in May. Sutskever began speaking out about safe AI even before he left OpenAI and called founding Safe Superintelligence “very personally meaningful.”
Sutskever was chief scientist at OpenAI before he founded his startup in June with venture capitalist Daniel Gross and former OpenAI scientist Daniel Levy. Amazon-backed Anthropic was also started by scientists who left OpenAI.
Before the departure of Sutskever and Levy, and other OpenAI staff members who left the company after the showdown between Sam Altman and the company’s board, OpenAI devoted 20% of its computing capacity to the Superalignment team, which Sutskever headed. That project was closed down after Sutskever’s departure.
OpenAI is currently in talks with Japan’s SoftBank on a deal that would raise that company’s valuation to $300 billion as well. Safe Superintelligence has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.
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