After an initial $1 billion fundraising two and a half months after its creation, Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI), the startup co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy, is set to raise at least the same amount again. Led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, this new funding round is expected to bring its valuation to nearly 30 billion euros.
SSI focuses all its efforts on developing a safe AGI, "and nothing else". To develop this AI capable of adapting and excelling in a wide range of fields, similar to or even surpassing human intelligence while prioritizing safety, the co-founders warned from the start that they would spend a few years on R&D before commercializing their product. 
This hasn't deterred investors, who are banking on the personalities of its co-founders. Ilya Sutskever resigned in May 2024, a month before SSI's launch, from his position as Chief Scientist at OpenAI, where he was one of the co-founders and co-led the superalignment team with Jan Leike. Daniel Levy also worked at OpenAI as a researcher and AI engineer, while Daniel Gross, an Israeli entrepreneur and investor, co-founded Cue, a company acquired by Apple, where he then worked on AI-related projects.

Previously valued at around 5 billion dollars, the completion of this second fundraising is expected to multiply it by six, with Greenoaks Capital Partners, the California-based private equity firm leading it, investing 500 million dollars.

Launch of Thinking Machines Lab

SSI is not the only company founded by former OpenAI collaborators poised to compete. Last Monday, Mira Murati, its former CTO, who had replaced Sam Altman during his temporary ousting as CEO and left the company in September 2024, announced the launch of Thinking Machines Lab.
The startup, which aims to make AI more understandable, customizable, and performant, aspires to become a model in scientific research and open source. It plans to tackle several current challenges:
  • Increased transparency: Today, AI research largely remains confined to major laboratories. Thinking Machines Lab is betting on open source and research publication to democratize access to technological advances.
  • More adaptable AI: Unlike generalist models optimized for specific tasks (such as programming or text generation), the company aims to develop multimodal systems capable of adapting to varied contexts.
  • Enhanced human collaboration: Rather than designing purely autonomous AI, Thinking Machines Lab emphasizes human-machine interaction, believing that AI should complement and enrich human expertise, not replace it.

A Team of Pioneers

Mira Murati (CEO) has assembled a team of experts who have contributed to major advances in AI. Among them, John Schulman (Chief Scientist), co-founder of OpenAI where he led the development of ChatGPT and was one of the architects of deep reinforcement models, and Barret Zoph (CTO), former Google expert in advanced neural architectures. The startup’s website states:
“We are scientists, engineers, and builders who have created some of the most widely used AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weight models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq, and Segment Anything.”
They are looking to expand their team, which currently has around thirty members: 
“We are building AI systems that push technical boundaries while delivering real value to as many people as possible. Our team combines rigorous engineering with creative exploration, and we are looking for collaborators to help shape this vision.”