SSI, an artificial intelligence startup founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist, has raised more than $1 billion in funding to support its research.

The company disclosed the investment today. The announcement came against the backdrop of funding milestones from two other generative AI startups: enterprise chatbot provider You.com Inc. and language model maker Sakana AI Co. Ltd. Nvidia Corp. participated in both companies’ funding rounds. 

Safe AI

SSI, officially Safe Superintelligence Inc., was launched in June by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever (pictured). He co-founded the startup with former OpenAI researcher Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, a onetime Y Combinator partner. Gross, SSI’s chief executive, also spent several years at Apple Inc. earlier in his career as the head of its machine learning group.

SSI’s goal is to develop highly capable AI models that possess so-called superintelligence and include guardrails for preventing harmful output. When the startup launched in June, Sutskever told Bloomberg that SSI “will not do anything else” besides working toward the creation of such models. That suggests the company doesn’t plan to launch commercial products in the near future.

The more than $1 billion investment that SSI announced today included contributions from Sequoia, DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. They were joined by NFDG, an investment vehicle run by SSI CEO Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Reuters reported that the funding round, which is believed to value SSI at $5 billion, will go toward hiring and infrastructure purchases.

Nature-inspired AI models

Sakana, another generative AI startup that raised funding today, was founded in Tokyo about a year before SSI. It develops relatively small language models optimized for cost efficiency. The company says that its algorithms are based on machine learning techniques inspired by nature.

In March, Sakana detailed one such nature-inspired technique: a method of combining open-source models into new, better ones that it calls evolutionary model merge. The company used the technique to develop a small language model that understands Japanese text and can solve math problems. Sakana says that the algorithm, which features 7 billion parameters, managed to outperform LLMs 10 times the size in internal evaluations.

The funding round that Sakana announced today is described as a Series A raise worth more than $100 million. New Enterprise Associates led the investment with participation from Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital and Nvidia. Sakana will use the capital to buy infrastructure, finance research initiatives and support the AI ecosystem in Japan.

Productivity-boosting chatbots

Nvidia’s name also appeared in another funding announcement this morning. You.com revealed that it has raised $50 million from the chipmaker, Salesforce Ventures, DuckDuckGo, SBVA and Day One Ventures. Georgian led the round, a Series B investment that brings the startup’s total raised to $99 million. 

You.com operates a cloud service that provides access to more than a half-dozen AI chatbots. One chatbot, which is marketed as a research assistant, can sift through dozens of sources to answer user questions. Another is capable of generating Python code based on natural language prompts. 

Users whose requirements are not met by the built-in chatbots can create their own. In conjunction with its funding announcement today, You.com introduced a set of collaboration features that allow workers to share their custom chatbots with team members. The features are rolling out for the paid Team tier of the company’s service.

You.com claims to have increased its annual recurring revenue fivefold since the start of the year thanks to strong demand. The company’s service is now used by publicly traded companies, venture-backed startups and other organizations.

Photo: OpenAI