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

SSI concentrates on 'safe superintelligence' with no yet

Sutskever's performance history and SSI's unique approach pique investor interest

By Kenrick Cai, Krystal Hu and Anna Tong

Feb 7 (Reuters) - Safe Superintelligence, an expert system startup co-founded by OpenAI's previous chief researcher 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 company's $5 billion appraisal from its last funding round in September, when it raised $1 billion from 5 financiers 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 triggered by Chinese start-up DeepSeek's unveiling of its affordable AI last month.

SSI, which has not produced any revenue, bybio.co has said its mission is to develop "safe superintelligence" that is smarter than people while lined up with human interests.

The business's conversations with existing and new investors are still in the early phases and terms could still change, the sources said today, who requested privacy to talk about private matters. It was not clear just how much cash SSI was seeking to raise.

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

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the general description of the company's objectives for safe AI, very little is learnt about the secretive startup or its work. What has sustained interest among financiers is Sutskever's reputation and the unique technique he has said his team is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to advancements that underpin the investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early advocate of scaling, which suggests devoting huge quantities of computing power and sitiosecuador.com information to refining AI designs.

That concept was the structure that caused generative AI advances like OpenAI's ChatGPT, setting the course for a wave of 10s of billions of dollars in investment in chips, data centers and energy.

Sutskever was likewise early in seeing the potential ceiling of such a method due to the dwindling swimming pool of available data to train designs. Recognizing the importance of putting in resources in the reasoning phase, or wiki.asexuality.org the stage of AI when a trained design reasons, he established the group that worked on what would end up being OpenAI's most current series of thinking designs, setting a new research direction that has actually been widely followed.

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

This sets it apart from other AI labs, including OpenAI which began as a not-for-profit however shifted focus to industrial items after ChatGPT suddenly took off in 2022. It generated nearly $4 billion in earnings in 2015 and projection $11.6 billion in income this year.

Little is publicly learnt about SSI's technique. In a Reuters interview in 2015 Sutskever, 38, said SSI was pursuing a new research direction, calling it "a new mountain to climb up", smfsimple.com however shared couple of other details.

Fundraising for the so-called structure design business shown no indications of slowing down. 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 concerns about their outsized bet with the disturbance from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which developed 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 prevented huge tech from plowing ever higher investment in their AI infrastructures this year, according to recent earnings statements.

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