SSI in speak with raise financing at $20 billion appraisal, up from $5 billion last September

SSI focuses on 'safe superintelligence' with no profits yet

Sutskever's performance history and SSI's unique technique pique financier interest

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, an expert system start-up co-founded by OpenAI's previous chief scientist Ilya Sutskever last year, remains in talks to raise financing at an appraisal of a minimum of $20 billion, four sources told Reuters.

That would quadruple the business's $5 billion appraisal from its last funding round in September, when it raised $1 billion from 5 investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI's fundraising checks the ability of prominent AI ventures to continue to command premium appraisals following an industry-wide reappraisal prompted by Chinese start-up DeepSeek's unveiling of its low-priced AI last month.

SSI, which has not generated any revenue, has said its mission is to develop "safe superintelligence" that is smarter than humans while aligned with human interests.

The business's conversations with existing and brand-new financiers are still in the early stages and terms could still alter, the sources said this week, who requested privacy to go over private matters. It was unclear how much money SSI was looking for to raise.

SSI, which was established in June with workplaces in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not react to ask for remark. Sutskever's co-founders are Daniel Gross, wiki.whenparked.com who previously led AI efforts at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI scientist.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the general explanation of the company's goals for safe AI, not much is understood about the deceptive startup or its work. What has sustained interest amongst financiers is Sutskever's reputation and the novel technique he has said his group is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to breakthroughs that underpin the investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early advocate of scaling, which suggests committing large amounts of computing power and information to refining AI models.

That principle was the foundation that resulted in generative AI advances like OpenAI's ChatGPT, the course for a wave of 10s of billions of dollars in investment in chips, information centers and energy.

Sutskever was likewise early in seeing the prospective ceiling of such a technique due to the diminishing swimming pool of available data to train models. Recognizing the significance of putting in resources in the reasoning stage, or the phase of AI when a trained model draws conclusions, he established the team that worked on what would end up being OpenAI's newest series of thinking designs, setting a new research direction that has actually been widely followed.

Explaining to investors not to anticipate short-term windfalls, SSI has said it plans to "scale in peace" by insulating its development from short-term industrial pressures.

This sets it apart from other AI laboratories, including OpenAI which began as a not-for-profit but shifted focus to commercial items after ChatGPT unexpectedly removed in 2022. It produced nearly $4 billion in revenue last year and projection $11.6 billion in revenue this year.

Little is openly understood about SSI's approach. In a Reuters interview last year Sutskever, 38, said SSI was pursuing a new research study direction, calling it "a brand-new mountain to climb", but shared couple of other details.

Fundraising for the so-called structure design business revealed no signs of decreasing. OpenAI remains in talks to double its appraisal to $300 billion, while competing Anthropic is completing a funding round that would value it at $60 billion.

Still, financiers face fresh questions about their outsized bet with the disruption from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which established open-source designs that equaled the leading U.S. AI designs at a fraction of the expense.

The appeal of DeepSeek knocked nearly $600 billion off Nvidia's market capitalization in late January. But it has not discouraged big tech from raking ever greater investment in their AI facilities this year, according to current earnings statements.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York, Kenrick Cai and Anna Tong in San Francisco; modifying by Kenneth Li and Nia Williams)