Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence gets access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform
Safe Superintelligence Inc., a frontier lab that’s trying to develop safe and ethically-aligned artificial superintelligence for the benefit of humanity, has hit the headlines again after striking a significant deal with Nvidia Corp. that will give it access to vast computing resources.
The deal will give SSI access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin graphics processing units, increasing the amount of compute available to the startup by an “order of magnitude.”
SSI is notable as it was founded by former OpenAI Group PBC researchers Illya Sustskever, Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross in June 2024. The startup said at the time of its launch that it’s trying to develop a safe and ethical form of superintelligence that will benefit all of humanity, without being distracted by revenue targets and the need to launch commercial products. SSI has been pretty quiet since its launch, although it did briefly re-enter the spotlight last year when Gross, who was serving as its Chief Executive, quit the company to join Meta Platforms Inc.’s new Superintelligence Labs unit.
Nvidia said that it’s investing in SSI after it gained rare access to its secret research. It added that SSI has managed to achieve a number of significant research milestones that show it’s making real progress towards its goal. According to Bloomberg, the deal is valued at multiple billions of dollars and will help to “accelerate SSI’s next stage of growth.”
“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so,” Sutskever told Bloomberg. “We are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.”
Sutskever gets a lot of attention from his peers because he’s considered to be one of the smartest minds in the AI industry. He first achieved fame when he co-authored and co-created AlexNet alongside the researchers Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, showing that it’s possible to scale deep neural networks with vast clusters of GPUs. It was a key piece of research that helped to lay the foundations of today’s generative AI models. Following that work, Sutskever went on to help found OpenAI, where he headed up that organization’s now-defunct Superalignment team. He later quit the company in the wake of a failed attempt by several of its shareholders to oust CEO Sam Altman, citing a “breakdown in communications” with his former boss.
Although it has not yet released any notable models or research papers, SSI has so far managed to raise more than $7 billion in funding and is valued at $32 billion, according to data from Pitchbook. Nvidia is one of its chief financial backers, alongside Alphabet Inc., Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital Partners, GV and others.
SSI’s continued focus on the safe and ethical development of AI superintelligence sets the company apart from many of its peers, which have lowered the bar in terms of safety in their quest to achieve commercial success. In contrast, Sutskever’s former company is perceived to have completely lost sight of its original mission, which was to advance digital intelligence in ways that benefit humanity as a whole, without being constrained by the need to generate revenue.
Nvidia said it will not only help SSI to achieve its goals, but will also collaborate with the startup on advancing its current and future-generation compute platforms, tapping into its “unique insights on the future of AI.”
Photo: OpenAI
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