OpenAI Co-Founder’s Firm Value Jumps Sixfold After $6 Billion Funding Round

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has reportedly raised $6 billion in new funding.

The round, as reported Friday (April 11) by the Financial Times (FT), values the company at $32 billion, a more than sixfold increase from the last time the firm raised money.

It’s the latest sign for continued investor enthusiasm in AI companies, even if — as the FT report noted — the company in question does not yet have a product.

The company has not provided much info on how it plans to overtake the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but co-founder Ilya Sutskever told the FT last year that he and his team had “identified a new mountain to climb that’s a bit different from what I was working on previously.”

Sources told the news outlet that SSI has been closed-mouthed even with its backers, though three sources close to the company said SSI was working on “unique ways” of building and scaling AI models.

A separate report from Reuters — also citing unnamed sources — said that Google and Nvidia were among the investors in this round. PYMNTS has contacted SSI for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

SSI was launched last year by Sutskever — former chief scientist at OpenAI — Apple AI vet Daniel Gross and AI researcher Daniel Levy.

In the fall of 2023, Sutskever was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to oust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from his position. Sutskever announced he would leave the company in May, apparently on good terms with Altman.

Still, SSI has taken a different approach than OpenAI, PYMNTS wrote last year, focusing solely on developing safe superintelligence without pressure from commercial interests.

“This has reignited the debate over the possibility of achieving such a feat, with some experts questioning the feasibility of creating a superintelligent AI, given the current limitations of AI systems and the challenges in ensuring its safety,” that report said.

“Critics of the superintelligence goal point to the current limitations of AI systems, which, despite their impressive capabilities, still struggle with tasks that require common sense reasoning and contextual understanding.”

These critics contend that the jump from narrow AI, which excels at specific tasks, to a general intelligence that exceeds human capabilities requires more than just increasing computational power or data.

Skeptics also argue that the challenges involved in creating a safe superintelligence could be insurmountable, due to humanity’s understanding of AI and the technology’s limitations.