Key takeaways:
- OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announces that he has started a new company called Safe Superintelligence Inc. that puts safety ahead of AI development.
- The new company will have only one goal and product: a safe supertintelligence. It also said achieving superintelligence is “within reach.”
- Sutskever quit OpenAI in May after nearly a decade, months after he helped oust CEO Sam Altman who was accelerating the commercialization of AI.
A month after leaving what is arguably the world’s most exciting AI startup, OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced he has founded a new company.
Called Safe Superintelligence Inc. or SSI, the new venture’s name is an open rebuke to OpenAI whose founding mission was to develop safe artificial general intelligence. Sutskever was one of the founders of OpenAI, which was created as a nonprofit to counterbalance a for-profit Google that dominated AI research.
Last November, Sutskever helped oust CEO Sam Altman just as OpenAI began accelerating its for-profit plans to commercialize ChatGPT and its underlying AI models. The concern is that developing AI faster than its safeguards is not safe for society.
Sutskever quit in May, hinting at a new project in a tweet. Now, he has revealed it as SSI – and the new venture’s mission is ambitious.
“Superintelligence is within reach,” declared an X/Twitter post by SSI. “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time.”
Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a level of machine capability that matches general human intelligence. Superintelligence is achieved when machines exceed human capabilities.
“We’ve started the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence,” the startup said. The company said it approaches safety and capabilities “in tandem,” with advances coming “as fast as possible” while ensuring “safety always remains ahead.”
“This way, we can scale in peace.”
Sutskever is joined by Daniel Gross, who sold a search engine to Apple and then ran AI and search projects there, and Daniel Levy, OpenAI’s former optimization team lead who has a doctorate from Stanford University. Levy is SSI’s principal scientist.
