OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who left the synthetic intelligence startup in May, has raised $1 billion from investors for his latest AI company Safe Superintelligence (SSI).
The company announced in a post on X that investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel, in addition to NFDG, an investment partnership co-led by SSI Managing Director Daniel Gross.
“We will work linearly toward the development of secure superintelligence, with one focus, one goal, and one product,” Sutskever wrote on X in May to announce the brand new enterprise.
Sutskever was chief scientist at OpenAI and led the corporate's Superalignment team alongside Jan Leike, who also left the corporate in May to hitch rival AI company Anthropic. Shortly after their departure, OpenAI disbanded the team, only a yr after it announced the group. Some of the team members were reassigned to other teams throughout the company, a source aware of the situation told CNBC on the time.
Leike wrote in a post on X on the time that OpenAI's “security culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”
Sutskever founded SSI with Daniel Gross, who led Apple's AI and search efforts, and former OpenAI worker Daniel Levy. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
“SSI is our mission, our name and our entire product roadmap because it is our sole focus,” the corporate posted on X. “Our singular focus means we are not distracted by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security and progress are insulated from short-term commercial constraints.”
Sutskever was considered one of the OpenAI board members involved within the temporary firing of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman in November.
In November, OpenAI's board of directors said in an announcement that Altman had “not been consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The matter quickly became more complex. The Wall Street Journal and other media reported that Sutskever had focused on ensuring that artificial intelligence didn’t harm people, while others, including Altman, had as a substitute been more desperate to advance the deployment of latest technologies.
Almost all of OpenAI's employees signed an open letter declaring that they would go away the corporate in response to the board's decision. Just a few days later, Altman was back at the corporate.
According to Altman sudden expulsion and before his swift reinstatement, Sutskever publicly apologized for his role within the ordeal.
“I deeply regret my involvement in the board's actions,” Sutskever wrote in a post on X on Nov. 20. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
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