Ilya Sutskever's SSI Raises $1 Billion for Safe Superintelligence

In September 2024, Matthew Berman discusses Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the AI company founded by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy. He frames the startup as a potential competitor to OpenAI and asks what its new funding reveals about the market for frontier AI research.

Berman recounts the November 2023 OpenAI board crisis, when Sam Altman was removed as CEO and soon returned. The original board statement said Altman had not been consistently candid in communications. Berman interprets that as lying, but the public statement does not establish the specific conduct behind that characterization.

Berman repeats speculation that Sutskever saw a frightening new technology or acted because of safety concerns. Those claims are not established by the evidence he presents. OpenAI's March 2024 account of an independent review said the decision followed a breakdown in trust and did not arise from concerns about product safety, security, or development pace.

Sutskever announced his departure from OpenAI in May 2024 and publicly expressed confidence in its leadership. Berman doubts the sincerity of that statement and suggests a safety disagreement motivated the move. Those are Berman's interpretations of another person's motives, not verified facts.

The video also discusses contemporary rumors about projects called Strawberry and Q* and possible uses of synthetic data for future models. Berman presents potential research directions, but the specific internal projects and their connection to the leadership crisis were not established by the material in the video.

SSI's founding statement says its single mission is to build safe superintelligence, treating safety and capability as linked technical challenges while attempting to avoid short-term product pressure. Berman questions how that focus will coexist with investors' expectations of a financial return. The company statement describes an aim; it does not prove the safety of any future system.

The founding team includes Sutskever, Gross, and Levy. Berman mistakenly calls Gross a former OpenAI chief scientist; that role was held by Sutskever. Gross was an entrepreneur and investor, while Levy was a researcher who had worked at OpenAI.

SSI announced that it had raised $1 billion from investors including NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel. Berman cites reporting of a $5 billion valuation and plans to use funds for computing and talent. He questions how a safety-first mission will work alongside venture capital's return expectations.

Berman notes that some investors also backed OpenAI and asks whether investing in both companies presents conflicts. Shared investors can create commercial and information-management questions, but an investment in two companies does not by itself establish improper conduct. He also distinguishes SSI's for-profit structure from OpenAI's governance arrangement at the time.

The video closes with SSI's hiring and compute plans as reported in 2024. Subsequent context: SSI announced that Gross left in June 2025, Sutskever became CEO, and Levy became president. The company later announced a strategic compute partnership with NVIDIA in July 2026.