NVIDIA Bets $5 Billion on Sutskever's 'Veiled' AI

[Financial News]  

NVIDIA agreed on the 27th, local time, to invest $5 billion, or about 7 trillion won, in the secretive artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
SSI is one of the most closely watched AI startups in Silicon Valley.
According to the Financial Times, NVIDIA and SSI announced a "long-term partnership" on the day and unveiled a large-scale investment plan as part of it. SSI will use NVIDIA's latest AI chip, Rubin.
Sources said the two companies did not disclose the exact investment amount, but $5 billion is expected to be invested. Such a large investment is usually interpreted as a sign that the company has reached a key milestone.
Sutskever said, "We have research results that are worth scaling up," adding, "With access to NVIDIA's large computers, we can scale them up."
SSI said NVIDIA's major investment will increase the computing power available to it over the next year by tenfold.
NVIDIA is moving faster as AI chipmakers have recently resumed large-scale investments in AI model startups. Last week, rival Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) announced plans to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.
The secretive SSI is a "mini" startup with only dozens of employees. It is developing AI models using an approach different from the one behind the large language models (LLMs) developed by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Despite its small size, it has strong support in Silicon Valley. Last year, it raised $2 billion in capital from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, GreenOaks and Lightspeed Venture Partners. At the time, the company was valued at $32 billion. NVIDIA is also one of its existing investors.
Despite its enormous valuation and exceptional talent, little is known about SSI. It is not even clear what exactly it is researching. No research output or first product has been released.
In 2024, Sutskever previously said that he and his team had "found a new mountain to climb, one that is a little different from what I used to work on."
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said Sutskever had already become "a pioneer who is shaking the foundations of modern AI." He added, "It will be exciting to see the breakthroughs SSI discovers with the help of NVIDIA's Rubin platform."
Sutskever, who played a key role in the breakthrough behind OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in 2022, later joined a coup to oust CEO Sam Altman the following year, left the company and co-founded SSI in 2024.
Sutskever is one of the early AI engineers who established the so-called scaling law, which shows that LLMs become more powerful as they are given more data and computing power.
Last November, he also argued that the law of diminishing returns applies to AI as well.


[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter