Nvidia bets on Open AI's former chief scientist startup SSI to receive large-scale computing power and financial support
After two years of low-key development, the artificial intelligence company founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia on Monday to prepare for the next phase of large-scale research and development expansion. As part of a long-term cooperation, the move is expected to not only improve the startup's ability to obtain computing resources, but also help Nvidia consolidate its leading position in the AI chip market and respond to challenges from competitors.
After two years of low-key development, the artificial intelligence company founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia on Monday to prepare for the next phase of large-scale research and development expansion. As part of a long-term cooperation, the move is expected to not only improve the startup's ability to obtain computing resources, but also help Nvidia consolidate its leading position in the AI chip market and respond to challenges from competitors. Nvidia said on the same day that it decided to make a "sizable" investment in the company after receiving rare access to in-depth knowledge of the research progress of Safe Superintelligence (SSI). However, the two parties did not disclose the transaction amount, and the specific financial terms are currently unknown. Some people familiar with the matter also revealed that Nvidia’s investment in SSI this time is as high as billions of dollars. It is reported that Sutskever co-founded SSI in 2024. The company claims to have only one goal, which is to achieve what it calls "safe superintelligence" through a "straight to the finish line" research sprint. The industry usually defines it as an artificial intelligence that has capabilities that surpass those of humans but does not pose a threat to humans. According to the cooperation agreement, SSI will obtain a large number of NVIDIA flagship GPU resources, and its callable computing power will increase by an order of magnitude. Both parties stated that this means that the company's computing power will increase by approximately 10 times. Sutskever said in the statement: "Our research has advanced to a stage worthy of further scale-up, and having the support of a large-scale NVIDIA supercomputer will help us achieve this goal. NVIDIA's investment will push our research to the next level." It is understood that before this cooperation, SSI mainly relied on TPU chips developed by Alphabet's Google for model training and calculations. This cooperation also reflects that as the AI craze in the United States continues to heat up, chip manufacturers are competing for the most important computing power customers in the future by investing in and binding leading AI startups. In March this year, Nvidia also reached a similar investment cooperation with Thinking Machines Lab founded by another former OpenAI executive, former chief technology officer Mira Murati. Thinking Machines released its first AI model earlier this month, which was trained on NVIDIA hardware. Sutskever and SSI It is reported that Sutskever was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Israel. He has shown talent in mathematics since he was a child. He later went to Canada to study under Nobel Prize winner and pioneer in the field of AI, Jeffrey Hinton, from which he became famous. In 2012, he co-published a paper with Hinton on computer vision. This research proves that as long as the scale of deep neural networks continues to be expanded and massive amounts of data and computing power are invested, the capabilities of AI can continue to improve. This paper is also widely regarded as the beginning of the modern AI competition. Sutskever subsequently joined Google and left in 2015 to co-found OpenAI. While at OpenAI, his research results promoted the birth of ChatGPT, and he was also one of the strongest supporters of the concept that "expanding data scale and computing power investment will eventually realize general artificial intelligence (AGI)". However, his relationship with OpenAI CEO Altman later broke down. In 2023, he voted to remove Altman, but a few months after Altman returned to the company, Sutskever also chose to leave OpenAI. Since leaving his post, Sutskever has rarely spoken out publicly. However, in one of his few public statements, he has begun to question the "scale expansion" route pursued by the AI industry for a long time, believing that simply relying on continuing to expand the scale of existing models, data and computing power may not be enough to promote real breakthroughs in AI.
After founding SSI, relying on Sutskever's reputation in the AI field, SSI quickly obtained approximately US$2 billion in financing from well-known venture capital institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. According to reports, SSI’s valuation reached approximately US$30 billion last year.
After founding SSI, relying on Sutskever's reputation in the AI field, SSI quickly obtained approximately US$2 billion in financing from well-known venture capital institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. According to reports, SSI’s valuation reached approximately US$30 billion last year.