Ilya Sutskever’s secretive AI company Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has reached a valuation of $30 billion in its latest funding round. According to reporting by Berber Jin and Deepa Seetharaman from The Wall Street Journal, the company is raising approximately $2 billion from investors.
Sutskever, who previously served as OpenAI’s chief scientist and helped develop ChatGPT, left the company last year following tensions with CEO Sam Altman. He co-founded SSI with Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, focusing exclusively on developing safe superintelligence rather than releasing interim products.
Unlike competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic, SSI operates in extreme secrecy with only about 20 employees. Interview candidates must place their phones in Faraday cages before entering the company’s offices, and employees are discouraged from mentioning their employer on LinkedIn profiles.
Sutskever has told associates he’s not using the same AI development methods employed at OpenAI, instead pursuing what he calls „a different mountain to climb.“
Despite its secrecy and lack of products, SSI has attracted significant investments from top venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The latest funding round is reportedly led by Greenoaks Capital and marks a sixfold increase from SSI’s $5 billion valuation last September.
In a rare public appearance at the NeurIPS conference last December, Sutskever discussed his vision of superintelligent systems, suggesting they could become self-aware and potentially seek coexistence with humans.