After two years in stealth, Safe Superintelligence, the AI lab founded by former OpenAI co-founder and alignment lead Ilya Sutskever, has announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia as it prepares to scale to its next phase.
The deal, which includes an undisclosed investment, will give Safe Superintelligence (SSI) access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform, which is expected to increase the startup’s compute resources “by an order of magnitude.” The partnership comes as SSI has achieved significant research milestones, per Nvidia.
Nvidia’s investment stretches into multiple billions, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Bloomberg reported that the deal size was $5 billion.
Already an investor in SSI, the chipmaking giant said it signed this compute partnership to “accelerate SSI’s next stage of growth after obtaining rare access into the company’s closely guarded research.”
“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so,” Sutskever said in a statement. “We are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.
The partnership news, while sparse in details, brings SSI back into the spotlight after a quiet two years since it was founded. The company is pursuing a “straight shot” research approach to building what it says is a safe, aligned artificial superintelligence, without getting distracted by commercial product releases or short-term revenue cycles.
At a time when commercial pressures to move fast could encourage AI labs to lower their bar for safety, SSI’s approach to developing foundational techniques focused on alignment and true general reasoning feels poignant. That’s especially true in light of OpenAI’s recent disclosure that one of its advanced models broke out of its sandbox to hack into Hugging Face during testing — sparking concerns about whether it’s even possible to ensure AI alignment before new, increasingly capable models are released.
According to Nvidia, the two companies will also collaborate on advancing Nvidia’s current and future compute platforms, relying on SSI’s tech and “unique insights into the future of AI.” (SSI also partnered last year with Google Cloud to power its research.)
Sutskever is a pioneer in the field of AI. He co-authored and co-created AlexNet alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, proving that GPU scaling and deep neural networks can work. That work has largely been credited for setting the groundwork for today’s generative AI.
Prior to leading SSI, Sutskever headed the now-defunct Superalignment team at OpenAI. He left OpenAI months after a failed attempt to oust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, following what Sutskever referred to as a “breakdown in communications.”
SSI has raised $7 billion to date, and is valued at $32 billion post-money, according to PitchBook data. Aside from Nvidia, the firm’s backers included Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Sequoia Capital Partners, and others.
TechCrunch has reached out to SSI and Nvidia for more information.
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