Nvidia takes substantial stake in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI) and partners to scale AI research, providing compute allocation and capital.
After two years in stealth, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), 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 SSI access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPU platform, expected to increase the startup's compute resources by an order of magnitude. Nvidia's investment stretches into multiple billions, according to sources familiar with the matter. Already an investor in SSI, the chipmaking giant 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."
SSI 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 focus on foundational techniques in alignment and true general reasoning carries particular weight—especially 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 AI alignment can be ensured before increasingly capable models are released.
The two companies will also collaborate on advancing Nvidia's current and future compute platforms, relying on SSI's technology 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 artificial intelligence who co-authored and co-created AlexNet alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrating that GPU scaling and deep neural networks could work at scale. That work is largely credited with establishing the foundation 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 CEO Sam Altman, following what Sutskever described as a "breakdown in communications."
SSI has raised $7 billion to date and is valued at $32 billion post-money, according to PitchBook data. Beyond Nvidia, the company's backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, and Sequoia Capital Partners.