OpenAI Co-founder Sutskever’s SSI in Talk with be Valued At $20 Bln,

SSI in talks to raise financing at $20 billion appraisal, up from $5 billion last September

SSI focuses on ‘safe superintelligence’ without any earnings yet

Sutskever’s performance history and SSI’s unique technique pique financier interest

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) – Safe Superintelligence, a synthetic intelligence startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in 2015, remains in talks to raise funding at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, four sources told Reuters.

That would quadruple the company’s $5 billion appraisal from its last funding round in September, when it raised $1 billion from 5 financiers consisting of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI’s fundraising evaluates the ability 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 low-cost AI last month.

SSI, which has not generated any profits, has said its mission is to develop „safe superintelligence“ that is smarter than humans while aligned with human interests.

The business’s conversations with existing and new investors are still in the early stages and terms could still alter, the sources said today, who asked for privacy to discuss personal matters. It was unclear how much cash SSI was looking for to raise.

SSI, which was established in June with workplaces in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not react to requests for remark. Sutskever’s co-founders are Daniel Gross, who previously led AI initiatives at Apple, addsub.wiki and Daniel Levy, a previous OpenAI researcher.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the brief explanation of the company’s goals for safe AI, very little is understood about the deceptive startup or its work. What has actually sustained interest among investors is and the novel method he has said his team is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to developments that underpin the investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early advocate of scaling, which suggests devoting huge amounts of calculating power and information to refining AI models.

That principle was the foundation that led to generative AI advances like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, setting the course for a wave of 10s of billions of dollars in financial investment in chips, information centers and energy.

Sutskever was also early in seeing the possible ceiling of such an approach due to the decreasing swimming pool of available information to train designs. Recognizing the significance of putting in resources in the reasoning phase, or the phase of AI when a trained model draws conclusions, he founded the team that worked on what would end up being OpenAI’s latest series of thinking designs, setting a new research direction that has actually been widely followed.

Explaining to investors not to expect short-term windfalls, SSI has said it intends to „scale in peace“ by insulating its progress from short-term commercial pressures.

This sets it apart from other AI labs, including OpenAI which began as a not-for-profit but moved focus to industrial products after ChatGPT all of a sudden removed in 2022. It generated almost $4 billion in income last year and projection $11.6 billion in income this year.

Little is openly understood about SSI’s approach. In a Reuters interview in 2015 Sutskever, 38, said SSI was pursuing a brand-new research study instructions, calling it „a new mountain to climb“, but shared few other details.

Fundraising for the so-called foundation design business shown no indications of decreasing. OpenAI remains in speak to double its appraisal to $300 billion, while rival Anthropic is completing a financing round that would value it at $60 billion.

Still, financiers face fresh concerns about their outsized bet with the interruption from Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which developed open-source models that measured up to the leading U.S. AI designs at a portion of the cost.

The appeal of DeepSeek knocked almost $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization in late January. But it has not prevented big tech from raking ever higher investment in their AI facilities this year, according to recent profits statements.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York City, Kenrick Cai and Anna Tong in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Nia Williams)