Google, Nvidia invest in OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup Safe Superintelligence

Alphabet and Nvidia have invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the stealth-mode AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, sources told Reuters. The company, which was only launched in June 2023, has already become one of the highest-valued AI startups, reaching a staggering $32 billion valuation in its latest funding round.

The funding round, led by Greenoaks with a reported $500 million contribution, also saw participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. It follows an earlier $1 billion raise in September 2023, which had pegged SSI’s value at $5 billion.

Sutskever, who exited OpenAI last year after internal conflict over its leadership, launched SSI alongside former Apple AI lead Daniel Gross and researcher Daniel Levy. The company has dual headquarters in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

While SSI has remained highly secretive about its product roadmap, it is reportedly working on next-generation AI models designed to exceed the capabilities of current systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

In a parallel strategic move, Alphabet’s cloud computing arm has struck a deal to provide Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to SSI, a shift from Google’s earlier stance of reserving its in-house AI chips for internal use.

SSI is reportedly favouring TPUs over Nvidia’s GPUs, which have long dominated the AI chip market with over 80% market share. That preference could signal a broader shift in AI infrastructure, with Google offering both TPUs and Nvidia GPUs via its cloud platform to cater to emerging needs in the AI model development space.

Meanwhile, Google and Amazon continue to invest heavily in another AI rival, Anthropic, which is developing models on Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips, a sign of intensifying competition in AI infrastructure among cloud giants.

The SSI investment reflects a wider trend of cloud majors acquiring strategic stakes in AI labs. Microsoft has placed its chips on OpenAI, Amazon and Google on Anthropic, and Nvidia has backed both xAI and OpenAI.

SSI, for its part, is betting on building models that go beyond just language understanding, with an aim to create reasoning-driven AI systems that eventually surpass human cognitive capabilities.