The new star SSI company in the field of artificial intelligence, led by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskif, is in progressing a new round of financing negotiations, with a valuation expected to be as high as $20 billion. Although the company has not yet achieved revenue, its strategy of focusing on developing "secure super-intelligence" has attracted a lot of investors' attention. This huge valuation not only reflects the market's confidence in AI technology, but also indicates the huge potential of SSI in the future.
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. In November last year, 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."
Key points:
SSI is expected to value $20 billion, although there is no revenue yet.
SSI focuses on developing security and super intelligence without putting commercial products first.
The "data peak" problem proposed by Sutskiffer prompted the search for new solutions.
SSI's future development has attracted much attention, and its unique strategy and deep scientific research background make it occupy an important position in the field of AI. With the advancement of financing, SSI is expected to make breakthroughs in the research and development of security and super intelligence, opening up a new path for the future of AI technology.