​SSI, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI scientist, soars to $20 billion

SSI, an artificial intelligence startup led by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, is currently in a new round of financing negotiations, and the company is expected to be valued at $20 billion, compared with last year. September's valuation quadrupled. Although SSI has not achieved any revenue yet, this huge valuation reflects investors' confidence in its potential development of transformative AI technologies.

Unlike other AI companies, SSI focuses on developing “secure superintelligence” instead of launching commercial products first like ChatGPT does. The company is currently in a pure research phase with the goal of achieving artificial super intelligence (ASI). This "ASI" goal may also be one of the reasons why Sutskief left OpenAI in May 2024, because his vision is not consistent with the direction of increasingly commercialization by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman .

According to Reuters, the financing discussion is still in its early stages and specific terms may change. Investors' strong interest mainly comes from Sutskif's deep background in research on artificial intelligence. At the NeurIPS Artificial Intelligence Conference in December, Sutskif talked about what he called the "data peak" problem, that is, the data used for AI training is limited, while computing power continues to grow. He compared the training data to fossil fuels, suggesting it will eventually run out.

To solve this problem, Sutskif believes that potential solutions for the future include AI agents with independent thinking and reasoning capabilities, synthetic data generation, and enhanced computing power in the inference process. Other large AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Deepseek are also exploring similar solutions. Last November, Sutskif said that the artificial intelligence industry has entered a new "age of discovery", and although scale expansion is still important, he emphasized the need to "scalate the right thing."