Ilya's SSI Hits $20B Valuation in 5 Months—No Product Yet
Ilya Sutskever's SSI is raising funds at a $20B valuation, aiming for safe AI breakthroughs. Can this secretive startup redefine AI’s future?
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The mysterious Ilya is back!
The long-silent Ilya Sutskever and his startup, SSI, have finally made headlines.
Yes, that very man Sutskever is back!
According to Reuters, Safe Superintelligence Inc. is in talks for a financing round at a valuation of $20 billion.
In September last year, the company completed its previous financing round at a valuation of $5 billion—raising $1 billion from five investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel, and NFDG.
The purpose of this financing is very clear: SSI stated that the funds will be used to purchase computing power and to hire more top-tier AI talent.
During his most recent public appearance at the NeurIPS 2024 conference, Ilya put forward the view that “pre-training is coming to an end.”
He believes that, given the limited data resources, the current pre-training methods will struggle to drive significant improvements in AI model performance.