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

SSI focuses on 'safe superintelligence' with no earnings yet

Sutskever's track record and SSI's unique approach 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 former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in 2015, remains in talk with raise funding at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, four sources informed 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 consisting of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI's fundraising tests the ability of prominent AI ventures to continue to command premium appraisals following an industry-wide reappraisal triggered by Chinese startup DeepSeek's unveiling of its affordable AI last month.

SSI, which has actually not created any profits, has said its mission is to develop "safe superintelligence" that is than human beings while lined up with human interests.

The company's conversations with existing and new financiers are still in the early stages and terms could still alter, the sources said today, who requested anonymity to discuss personal matters. It was unclear just how much cash SSI was seeking to raise.

SSI, which was founded in June with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not react to demands for comment. Sutskever's co-founders are Daniel Gross, who formerly led AI efforts at Apple, clashofcryptos.trade and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI scientist.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the cursory explanation of the business's goals for safe AI, very little is known about the secretive startup or its work. What has sustained interest amongst financiers is Sutskever's credibility and the unique technique he has said his team is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to breakthroughs that underpin the financial investment craze in generative AI. He was an early advocate of scaling, which implies committing huge quantities of computing power and information to refining AI models.

That idea was the structure that caused generative AI advances like OpenAI's ChatGPT, setting the course for a wave of tens of billions of dollars in investment in chips, data centers and energy.

Sutskever was also early in seeing the possible ceiling of such a technique due to the dwindling swimming pool of available information to train models. Recognizing the importance of putting in resources in the reasoning stage, or the stage of AI when a trained design draws conclusions, he established the team that dealt with what would become OpenAI's latest series of reasoning designs, setting a new research instructions that has been commonly followed.

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

This sets it apart from other AI labs, including OpenAI which started as a nonprofit but shifted focus to industrial products after ChatGPT unexpectedly removed in 2022. It produced nearly $4 billion in earnings last year and projection $11.6 billion in revenue this year.

Little is openly understood about SSI's approach. In a Reuters interview in 2015 Sutskever, 38, said SSI was pursuing a new research instructions, calling it "a brand-new mountain to climb", however shared couple of other details.

Fundraising for the so-called structure model companies shown no signs of slowing down. OpenAI remains in talk with double its appraisal to $300 billion, while competing Anthropic is settling a financing round that would value it at $60 billion.

Still, financiers face fresh questions about their outsized bet with the disruption from Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which developed open-source designs that equaled the top U.S. AI models at a portion of the cost.

The appeal of DeepSeek knocked nearly $600 billion off Nvidia's market capitalization in late January. But it has actually not prevented big tech from raking ever higher investment in their AI infrastructures this year, according to current revenues declarations.

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