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Former OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever has no immediate plans for his AI startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI) to release a product, but he has plenty of capital: $3 billion, to be exact. During a rare appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s show, Sutskever explained the thinking behind his research-heavy strategy, and why he wants to stay out of the “rat race” of the current AI market.
“It’s very nice to not be affected by the day-to-day market competition,” Sutskever said on the podcast.
Sutskever is widely-regarded as one of the definitive voices in AI. He was one of the original founders of OpenAI, prior to which he helped create AlexNet, an image-recognition AI model that formed the basis for much of the deep learning work being done in the industry today.
In May 2024, Sutskever said that he would be leaving OpenAI. One month later, he announced his new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Instead of following the business model of other frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which release new products in order to fund their massively expensive research, SSI claims to be entirely focused on building a world-changingly powerful artificial intelligence, far more capable than today’s models. At the time, Sutskever said that his company would build super-intelligent AI “in a straight shot, with one focus, one goal, and one product.”
“Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles,” the company wrote on its website, “and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures.”
On Patel’s podcast, Sutskever explained that competitors in the AI market have to participate in “the rat race,” which forces business leaders to make difficult trade-offs in order to balance commercial success with safety considerations.
By not joining this race and not needing to worry about releasing new products, Sutskever told Patel, his company will be able to make the $3 billion that it’s raised go much further than his commercially-minded competitors. Those companies have to set aside much of their funds to constantly design, run, and maintain their AI models for customers, Sutskever said, while SSI can focus all of its resources on research.
But Sutskever isn’t entirely married to his straight-shot plan. He acknowledged that if the timeline to building a super-intelligent AI system is longer than anticipated, his company may be forced to release a product.
Sutskever also opined that if he felt it would be useful for the world to see powerful AI in action, he could release a product sooner than he anticipates. He shared a prediction: As AI becomes more powerful, people will change their behavior. If giving the world a glimpse of powerful (but not yet superintelligent) AI inspires the public to advocate for greater safety standards, something he claimed to be heavily in favor of, that could be a compelling reason to release a product.
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Ben Sherry
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