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

SSI concentrates on 'safe superintelligence' without any profits yet

Sutskever's track record and SSI's distinct method pique financier 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, 4 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 five financiers consisting of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI's fundraising evaluates the capability 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 not created any revenue, has said its objective is to establish "safe superintelligence" that is smarter than people while lined up with human interests.

The company's discussions with existing and brand-new financiers are still in the early phases and terms might still alter, the sources said today, who requested anonymity to discuss personal matters. It was not clear how much money SSI was looking for to raise.

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

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the general description of the business's objectives for safe AI, not much is understood about the secretive start-up or its work. What has sustained interest among financiers is Sutskever's credibility and the unique technique he has said his team is working on.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to developments that underpin the financial investment frenzy in generative AI. He was an early supporter of scaling, which suggests devoting large amounts of calculating power and data to refining AI models.

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

Sutskever was likewise early in seeing the possible ceiling of such an approach due to the diminishing swimming pool of available data to train designs. Recognizing the value of putting in resources in the inference stage, or the stage of AI when a trained design draws conclusions, he founded the group that worked on what would become OpenAI's newest series of reasoning models, setting a new research study instructions that has been extensively followed.

Explaining to financiers not to expect 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 laboratories, consisting of OpenAI which started as a not-for-profit but moved focus to industrial items after ChatGPT unexpectedly took off in 2022. It produced nearly $4 billion in earnings in 2015 and forecast $11.6 billion in earnings this year.

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

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

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

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

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