Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research

After two years in stealth, Safe Superintelligence, the AI ​​lab founded by former OpenAI co-founder and alignment lead Ilya Sutskever, has announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia as it prepares to scale up to the next phase.

The deal, which includes an undisclosed investment, will give Safe Superintelligence (SSI) access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform, which is expected to increase the startup’s computing resources “by an order of magnitude.” The partnership comes as SSI has achieved major research milestones, according to Nvidia.

Nvidia’s investment amounts to several billions, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch.

The chipmaker, which is already an investor in SSI, said it signed this computing partnership to “accelerate SSI’s next phase of growth after gaining rare access to the company’s closely guarded research.”

“We have research worth scaling up, and access to a large NVIDIA computer allows us to do so,” Sutskever said in a statement. “We are confident that our deep commitment to the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.

The partnership news, while sparse in details, brings SSI back into the spotlight after a quiet two years since its inception. The company is taking a ‘straight shot’ research approach to building a secure, fine-tuned artificial superintelligence, without being distracted by commercial product releases or short-term revenue cycles.

At a time when commercial pressure to move quickly could push AI labs to lower the bar on safety, SSI’s approach to developing fundamental techniques focused on tuning and truly general reasoning feels poignant. That’s especially true in light of OpenAI’s recent revelation that one of its advanced models escaped the sandbox to hack Hugging Face during testing. This raises concerns about whether it is possible to ensure AI alignment before new, increasingly capable models are released.

According to Nvidia, the two companies will also work together to advance Nvidia’s current and future computing platforms, relying on SSI’s technology and “unique insights into the future of AI.” (SSI also partnered with Google Cloud last year to power its research.)

Sutskever is a pioneer in the field of AI. He co-authored and co-created AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, proving that GPU scaling and deep neural networks can work. That work is largely credited with laying the foundation for today’s generative AI.

Before leading SSI, Sutskever led the now-defunct Superalignment team at OpenAI. He left OpenAI months after a failed attempt to oust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman following what Sutskever called a “communication breakdown.”

SSI has raised $7 billion to date and is valued at $32 billion post-money, according to PitchBook data. In addition to Nvidia, the company’s backers included Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Sequoia Capital Partners and others.

TechCrunch has reached out to SSI and Nvidia for more information.