SSI in talks to raise financing at $20 billion appraisal, up from $5 billion last September

SSI concentrates on 'safe superintelligence' without any income 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 former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in 2015, remains in talk with raise funding at an appraisal of at least $20 billion, 4 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 five investors consisting of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and DST Global.

SSI's fundraising tests the capability 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 actually not created any earnings, has said its objective is to develop "safe superintelligence" that is smarter than human beings while lined up with human interests.

The company's conversations with existing and new financiers are still in the early phases and terms could still alter, the sources said today, who requested privacy to discuss private matters. It was unclear how much cash SSI was looking for to raise.

SSI, which was established in June with workplaces in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, did not react to requests for comment. Sutskever's co-founders are Daniel Gross, who formerly led AI initiatives at Apple, grandtribunal.org and Daniel Levy, visualchemy.gallery a previous OpenAI researcher.

SECRETIVE STARTUP

Beyond the brief description of the business's objectives for safe AI, not much is known about the secretive start-up or its work. What has actually sustained interest amongst investors is Sutskever's track record and the unique method he has said his group is dealing with.

In AI circles, he is a legend for his contributions to advancements that underpin the financial investment craze in generative AI. He was an early supporter of scaling, which means devoting vast quantities of calculating power and data to refining AI models.

That idea was the structure that led to generative AI advances like OpenAI's ChatGPT, setting 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 potential ceiling of such a technique due to the diminishing pool of available information to train designs. Recognizing the importance of putting in resources in the inference stage, or the phase of AI when a trained model reasons, he founded the group that worked on what would become OpenAI's newest series of reasoning designs, setting a new research study direction that has been commonly 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 commercial pressures.

This sets it apart from other AI labs, including OpenAI which began as a not-for-profit but moved focus to business products after ChatGPT all of a sudden removed in 2022. It created nearly $4 billion in revenue last year and forecast $11.6 billion in profits this year.

Little is publicly 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", but shared few other details.

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

Still, investors deal with fresh questions about their outsized bet with the disturbance from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which developed open-source designs that matched the top U.S. AI designs at a fraction of the cost.

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

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