The value of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, has surpassed 40 trillion won in less than a year.
According to Bloomberg News on the 17th, Sutskever's AI startup "Safe Superintelligence" (SSI) is seeking investments of over $1 billion.
Sources told Bloomberg News that "Gryphon Capital Partners, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, is leading this investment round," and noted that "(from this funding, SSI's) corporate value is expected to exceed $30 billion (about 43 trillion won)."
This achievement comes less than a year after SSI's establishment. Bloomberg assessed that "SSI is joining the ranks of the most valuable private technology corporations in the world."
Sutskever established SSI with Daniel Gross, who was the head of AI at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former researcher at OpenAI, aiming to build safe and powerful AI systems after leaving OpenAI in May last year.
While it still falls significantly short of OpenAI, valued at $260 billion (about 376 trillion won), it has grown six times from the $5 billion (about 7.2 trillion won) valuation it had when it secured its initial $1 billion investment in September last year.
There is no detailed information available about SSI's business. Sutskever stated in a June interview with Bloomberg that "our goal is to develop a safe superintelligence as our first product," adding, "until then, we will not do anything else, and we will be completely free from dealing with complex products or the pressures of competition."
Before leaving OpenAI, Sutskever led the Superalignment team for 10 months. This team was a safety group that researched how to control future superintelligent AI to behave in ways that are useful to humans and not harmful.
However, another executive who was co-leading the team with Sutskever also left the company, leading to the disbandment of the Superalignment team.
Born in Russia, Sutskever co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, serving as director and chief scientist, playing a key role in the development of ChatGPT.
However, he showed differences of opinion with Altman over the pace and safety issues of AI development, effectively leading the dismissal of Altman as CEO by the OpenAI board in November last year.