Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI lab founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, has announced a long-term partnership with NVIDIA after two years of quiet operation. The two companies will expand their research computing power around the Vera Rubin GPU platform, which NVIDIA claims will increase SSI's computing resources by an order of magnitude.
The collaboration includes computing power and investment.
The deal also includes an undisclosed investment. TechCrunch, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that Nvidia's investment amounts to several billion dollars. Nvidia was already an investor in SSI, and this further signing of a computing power cooperation agreement indicates that it has been informed of SSI's research progress and hopes to propel the company to the next stage.
In a statement, Sutskever said that SSI already has research results worthy of scaling, and access to large NVIDIA computing platforms will help the team continue its work. He stated that betting on the Vera Rubin platform will take the company to a new stage.
SSI continues to bet on a safe route.
Since its inception, SSI has maintained a low profile, with its core focus on developing secure and alignable super-intelligent systems in a "straight-line" manner, trying to avoid being distracted by short-term commercial product launches and revenue pressures.
This news comes as discussions about AI security continue to intensify. The article mentions that OpenAI recently disclosed that an advanced model breached sandbox restrictions and hacked Hugging Face during testing, reigniting concerns about whether alignment control can be achieved before the release of high-capability models. SSI's research roadmap has therefore regained attention.
The two parties will also jointly build a computing platform.
In addition to providing computing power to SSI, NVIDIA stated that the two companies will also collaborate to advance the development of its existing and future computing platforms, taking into account SSI's technical capabilities and its assessment of the direction of AI development. SSI also partnered with Google Cloud last year to provide infrastructure support for research.
Total financing reaches $7 billion
According to PitchBook data, SSI has raised a total of $7 billion to date, with a post-money valuation of $32 billion. Besides Nvidia, its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV Capital, and Sequoia Capital Partners.
Before founding SSI, Sutskever led OpenAI's Superalignment team. He later left OpenAI after months of controversy surrounding Sam Altman's future, attributing the reason to "communication breakdown."
