Exclusive-Alphabet, Nvidia invest in OpenAI co-founder Sutskever’s SSI.
Alphabet and Nvidia have joined prominent venture capital investors to back Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever that has quickly risen to become one of the most valuable artificial intelligence startups months after its launch, a source familiar with the matter said.
The funding illustrates renewed interest from the big tech and infrastructure providers in making strategic investments in the startups developing cutting-edge AI that requires massive amounts of computing power. Alphabet, which has its own AI models, earlier in the week announced a deal by its cloud computing arm to sell SSI access to tensor processing units (TPUs), its in-house AI chips.
SSI, which sources say was recently valued at $32 billion in a round led by Greenoaks, is one of the highest-profile startups working on AI model research, thanks to Sutskever’s stellar track record in predicting the next big thing in AI development.
The twin moves by Alphabet’s corporate and cloud division with high-profile AI labs including SSI and Anthropic show the tech giant’s evolving AI hardware strategy.
Google offers both Nvidia GPUs and its own TPUs through its cloud service. Its own chips are intended to excel at specific AI tasks and are more efficient than general-purpose GPUs. These chips have been used to build large-scale AI models, such as Apple and Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor that has received billions of dollars of funding from Google and Amazon.
Google and Nvidia also face a challenger in Amazon, which is building its own competing processors called Trainium and Inferentia. Amazon has said as far back as 2023 that Anthropic would develop its technology on those chips. The tech giant announced in December that Anthropic would be the first customer to use a massive supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of its own chips.
Source: Globalbankingandfinance
