Ilya Sutskever Raises $1B for Safe Superintelligence

Today on the AI Daily Brief, OpenAI co founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc. Has raised $1 billion before that. On the brief, the president of OpenAI Japan seems to indicate that GPT Next is coming and it's 100 times more powerful than GPT4. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show. Notes welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with a conversation that ripped around Twitter X. Yesterday at the KDDI Summit, a representative from OpenAI Japan shared a slide that seemed to indicate that GPT next, which was in quotes so isn't necessarily an official name, is set to be 100x more powerful than the GPT4 era models we have now. The speaker was Tadao Nagasaki, who was announced back in April as the president of OpenAI Japan. Now, the way that Twitter X is taking this is that this 100x improvement on GPT Next is a specific real estimate rather than a demonstration of the exponentiality of AI, and that GPT Next is the name of the model. I'm not totally sure that something isn't being lost in translation. It seems fairly possible to me that this slide was meant to just represent the exponential nature of AI growth, and that the slide which said GPT next in 2024 and had it at 100x more powerful than the GPT4 era was not in fact saying that the NEXT model would be called GPT Next, that it would come out in 2024, or that it would be 100x more powerful, but instead was more meant as a demonstration and then just got picked up and ripped around the Internet, as the Internet does. Still, I think the excitement around it shows just how hungry for whatever comes beyond GPT four people are. And frankly, it was probably pretty dangerous to put this in a slide if it wasn't actually claiming that GPT Next was coming out this year and was going to be a hundred times more powerful. One of the things we've been discussing a lot recently is Wall street's relationship with AI. Nvidia had a terrible day yesterday, wiping out $279 billion. That is the single biggest day of market cap loss in history over the last three sessions since it reported earnings, it's now down 14%. Now, part of the specific reason for Nvidia's losses was that the US Department of Justice has apparently sent a subpoena to Nvidia as part of a larger antitrust probe. Bloomberg characterizes the antitrust probe as escalating. As they put it, the doj, which has previously delivered questionnaires to companies, is now sending legally binding requests that oblige recipients to provide information. This takes the government a step closer to launching a formal complaint. The concern is that Nvidia is making it harder to switch to other suppliers and penalize buyers that don't exclusively use its chips. Now, while some of the issues may be Nvidia specific, Nvidia's place as a bellwether for the rest of the market means that these big losses have people looking at downstream implications as well as Again, Bloomberg writes, Nvidia route has traders watching $100 share level amid vacuum after Earnings There are a few potential catalysts on the horizon, said Michael Kerbride, portfolio manager at Evercore Wealth. We're in a bit of a void right now. We're through with earnings and there's lots of economic data coming up this month. There's a lot of caution ahead of that when you're in a trading vacuum. It becomes a shoot first market that is very short term in nature and indeed, it does seem like broader uncertainty is coming home to roost as the main market force, the information writes. Just what we needed, a stock market chill to remind us that summer is over. Investors on Wall street were dumping stocks left, right and center on Tuesday after anemic manufacturing data reminded people of economic uncertainties they had put out of their minds. Tech stocks were a sea of red from the smallest to the biggest. Later, they write. Enthusiasm for both Microsoft and Nvidia has been dampened by questions about the staying power of corporate spending on AI chips. Apple stock, meanwhile, has outperformed other big tech stocks in the past three months. Its rally may be premature, however, as Apple can't escape its own version of the AI question. The company next week unveils its newest iPhone, which means we're closer to seeing whether the addition of AI features can jumpstart stalled iPhone sales. There's no guarantee that consumers will be any more willing to spend for AI powered services than businesses are. This should be an interesting fall that was reflected in a conversation on CNBC with a portfolio manager who said, we like Apple for its sustained business model, not its AI story. Anyways, lots of interesting things coming up in the weeks ahead when it comes to the markets. Next story Today we have yet another Aquahire non acquisition thing. Amazon has hired the founders of the industrial robotics company covariant. The company was last valued at $625 million back in April 2023. And once again, this same model of hiring the founders and licensing the startup's foundation models is the alternative to an actual acquisition. Only around a quarter of the company's employees are joining Amazon, all who will be joining the fulfillment technologies and robotics team. I don't know how this trend ends, but I do know that if startups keep selling themselves and ditching out on the payday for half or more of the company, it's going to be a lot harder to hire people into startups. Lastly, today, the Oprah AI Special hasn't even come out and already it's controversial, Ars Technica writes. Oprah's upcoming AI television special sparks outrage among tech critics. AI opponents say Gates, Altman and others will guide Oprah through an AI sales pitch. The show is, of course airing on September 12th and quote, aims to explore AI's impact on daily life. You can read the piece for yourself, but basically it shows once again just how fraught the discourse around AI is. That's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Today's Episode is brought to you by Venice. Venice is a private, uncensored, generative AI app. It accesses open source models to enable text, image and code generation without the fear of being spied on or having your data exploited. Discuss anything with Venice without concern about it being monitored, sold, or given to advertisers and governments. Venice is different because your conversations and creations are kept securely within the browser, never stored or accessible by Venice. Unlike other AI apps, Venice won't tell you what's okay to say or not. Venice won't patronize you. It simply provides direct access to machine intelligence. No topics are off limits, no ideas are taboo. With Venice, you're in control of the AI, as you should be. Pro subscriptions are available for $49 a year, or $8 per month. AI Daily Brief listeners receive a 20% discount on Venice Pro. Visit Venice AI NLW and enter the discount code NLWDAILYBRIEF. That's NLW Daily Brief. All one word. Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent, which is of course our platform that helps you learn how to use AI tools and perhaps even more importantly, gives you ideas on the best use cases that are actually going to help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. To recognize the end of summer and back to school, back to work. We are running our best promotion ever. When you sign up for Super Intelligent between now and the end of August using code so back, your first month will be 100% free. The platform features over 600 fun, highly practical AI tutorials that get you using AI fast and with an eye to actually transforming how you get things done. We've just launched super for Teams, so if you have a group of people at your company that want to figure out how to use AI together, I highly suggest you check it out. But for those of you who are using superintelligent as an individual, once again, if you sign up for superintelligent between now and the end of the month using Code Soback, you will get your first month 100% free. Go to be super AI and check it out today. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. One of the big questions surrounding the firing and then ultimately rehiring of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI last year, was whether there was some advance, some technical innovation, some breakthrough that had happened that that had spooked some folks inside OpenAI, creating a rift between them and Sam Altman in terms of how they would think about releasing that breakthrough onto the world. The way that this was popularized was a phrase what did Ilya see? Ilya was of course referring to Ilya Sutskever, one of the original co founders of OpenAI and the company's chief scientist. On November 24, as the whole thing was happening, A16Z's Mark Andreessen wrote, seriously though, what did Ilya see? Elon Musk responded, yeah, something scared Ilya enough to want to fire Sam. What was it? For months this conversation persisted, despite the fact that all the people involved with OpenAI said that it wasn't an issue of safety that caused their firing of Sam Altman, and a board review after that found the same thing. The question never really went away, and whatever the answer to the question was, it seemed pretty clear to many that Ilya was probably not long for OpenAI. Even though he had dramatically switched sides and come back to working with the company and supporting Sam Altman, he he was largely absent for the following six months. Indeed, it was almost exactly six months until May, when Ilia announced on Twitter, after almost a decade, I've made the decision to leave OpenAI, he continued, the company's trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous and I'm confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial. It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together and I will miss everyone dearly. So long and thanks for everything. I'm excited for what comes next, a project that is very personally meaningfully to me, about which I will share details in due time. A little over a month later we started to get some details. Ilya announced that he was starting a new company called Safe Superintelligence, or ssi. The company announced itself with a post on X Superintelligence is within reach Building Safe Superintelligence is the most important technical problem of our time. We've started the world's first straight shot SSI lab with one goal and one product, a Safe Superintelligence. It's called Safe Superintelligence, Inc. SSI is our mission, our our name and our entire product roadmap. Because it is our sole focus. Our team, investors and business model are all aligned to achieve ssi. We approach safety and capabilities in tandem as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead. This way we can scale in peace. Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security and progress are all insulated from short term commercial pressures. The founders of the company included not only Ilya, but prominent AI investor Daniel Gross as well as AI scientist Daniel Levy. Now, upon the announcement, there was some skepticism. AI safetyist Ilieazer Yudkowski wrote, if you have an alignment plan, I can't shoot down in 120 seconds. Let's hear it. So far you have not said anything different from the previous packs of disaster monkeys who all said exactly this almost verbatim, but I'm open to hearing better. Still, by and large, the sentiment was excitement, with more than a fair bit of speculation around just how much this company was going to raise. The sense around the AI space was that Ilya likely had a blank check. And now a couple months later, that certainly appears to be the case today. Once again, they tweeted, ssi is building a straight shot to Safe superintelligence. We've raised $1 billion from NFTG, A16Z, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel. The announcement also came with an exclusive in Reuters about what the company wanted to build. Additional details shared in Reuters the The $1 billion came at apparently around a $5 billion valuation. Adding in perhaps the most duh sentence I've ever read, the funding underlines how some investors are still wanting to make outsized bets on exceptional talent focused on foundational AI research. The rest of the Reuters article doesn't have that much in the way of details. SSI is saying that it plans to partner with cloud providers and chip companies to fund computing power needs, but hasn't decided who it will work with. Reuters also writes Sutskever was an early advocate of scaling, a hypothesis that AI models would improve in performance given vast amounts of computing power. The idea and its execution kicked off a wave of AI investment in chips, data centers and energy, laying the groundwork for generative AI advances like ChatGPT. Ilya says he will approach scaling in a different way than his former employer. Without sharing details, he said, everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling? Some people can work really long hours and they'll just go down the same path faster. It's not so much our style, but if you do something different, then it becomes possible for you to do something special. So basically is a sense of some different approach that they're going to take, although what that different approach is remains obscure or hidden, at least to the public. In terms of immediate reactions, some of the discussion was about technical debates. Karim Kaya writes. Ilya Sitzkever and Daniel Levy disagree with Jan Lecun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, on the idea that superintelligence can't be achieved with autoregressive models. A significant new wave is approaching, set to push the boundaries of the current architecture. Others pointed out that this probably had something to say about the current state of AI funding. Accelerate, Harder writes if you're wondering if AI investment is drying up, here's a $1 billion raise for a company that probably doesn't even have a demo yet. Sure, it's about the team, but that's still quite a data point. Marc Andreessen said, We at A16Z are delighted to be on the SSI team and enthusiastic about the mission and strategy. Now I want to talk about this idea, as reiterated here by Andrew Curran, that SSI's only goal and product is superintelligence. For many, this idea that you could raise a billion dollars on a $5 billion valuation just on the strength of a team will seem ludicrous. They will take it as a sign that the AI bubble is reaching some sort of peak. However, I think that there is a fundamental bifurcation in the way that people are looking at the AI space, particularly when it comes to AGI or superintelligence. On the one hand are those who view AI through a traditional business lens of needing to have a return on investment. This is where we get the type of analysis expressed in Sequoia's AI $600 billion question, although I will note that Sequoia was listed among the SSI investors. In any case, the idea here is that the big tech hyperscalers have spent a huge amount building out AI infrastructure and are significantly in the hole on that investment, at least a half trillion dollars. On the flip side though, are those who think that the opportunity is so large that the possibility of winning that dwarfs any cost right now, as summed up by VC Sarah Tavel in a recent blog post, if you're a big stack player like Meta, Microsoft, Google or any of the other foundation model pure plays, you have no choice but to keep raising your bet. The prize and power of winning is too great. If you blink, you are left empty handed watching someone else count your chips. It's likely hundreds of billions will be destroyed and trillions earned later, she writes. The prize is theoretically so large and if a clear winner emerges, their market opportunity so uncapped, you have to keep increasing your bet. This, I think, is the simple logic behind all of this investment. It's as simple as trillions of dollars of upside handicapped at the possibility that any particular team wins. One of the things that I think is most interesting about SSI's approach is that while many are wondering how they're ever going to return on investment when they say they won't have any sort of business model or commercial distractions, I actually wonder if some of the investors are sitting there thinking to themselves that that lack of distraction is actually the optimal way to pursue AGI. While Xai, Google, Meta and Microsoft are all messing around with quarterly reports and the fickle vagaries of Wall street expectations, SSI blissfully ignores any sort of commercial pressure. There's a certain logic there that I think people are missing. Then again, the question is where will the next billion dollars, or really the next $10 billion, come from? As we've discussed recently, even having raised 13 or $14 billion at this point, OpenAI is likely heading back to the well for more. Will SSI be able to raise similar size funds? Or because they're not planning on releasing a ChatGPT competitor, will their costs be dramatically lower? There are all these really interesting questions that to me keep coming back to the idea that a team that's totally unencumbered by any sort of commercial pressure or consumer product pressure might actually be in a better position to win this space. But of course we're just gonna have to wait and see. In any case, it's clear that they have some resources to go after this new mountain, as Ilia called it. And it will be very interesting to see what they come up with. For now, though, that's gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time. Peace.