“Nvidia is investing in former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever's secretive artificial-intelligence lab, part of a long-term partnership that could boost the startup's access to computing power while helping the chip giant fend off a rival.
The chip maker made a "substantial" investment after getting a rare glimpse into the state of the startup's research, the companies said Monday. Financial terms of the deal couldn't be learned.
As part of the pact, Sutskever's company, Safe Superintelligence, will receive access to large amounts of Nvidia's flagship graphics-processing unit, or GPU, hardware -- enough to increase its computing resources by an "order of magnitude," the companies said. It had previously been relying primarily on chips made by Alphabet's Google, known as tensor-processing units, or TPUs, according to people familiar with the matter.
The partnership illustrates the strategies chip makers are deploying to secure high-profile customers during America's AI boom.
Nvidia forged a similar investment deal in March with another OpenAI veteran, former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who co-founded her own lab, Thinking Machines Lab, last year. Thinking Machines released its first AI model, trained on Nvidia's hardware, earlier this month.
Sutskever, a famed researcher whose breakthroughs helped usher in the AI revolution, co-founded Safe Superintelligence in 2024. The startup has said it has a single goal: a "straight-shot" research sprint to what he dubbed "safe superintelligence" -- industry speak for AI that can do whatever humans can do, without threatening humanity.
The company quickly attracted some $2 billion in funding from venture capital heavyweights such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. It has so far kept its research closely held. It achieved a roughly $30 billion valuation as of last year, based on the strength of Sutskever's reputation in the field, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Born in the former Soviet Union and raised in Israel, Sutskever was a math prodigy who made his name as a graduate student in Canada studying under the Nobel Prize-winning AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton.
He co-wrote a paper with Hinton in 2012 on computer vision that kicked off the modern AI race by showing that scaling deep neural networks with huge amounts of data and computing power produced measurable gains in intelligence.
Sutskever then joined Google, but left to become one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015.
There, his insights helped lead to the creation of ChatGPT, and he became famous for his conviction that scaling up the amount of data and computing power used to train AI models would lead to the company's stated goal of creating "artificial general intelligence," or AGI.
He later had a painful rupture with the company's chief executive, Sam Altman -- voting to fire him before himself leaving the company months after Altman's reinstatement.
Since then, in rare public statements, Sutskever has publicly doubted whether simply scaling up current paradigms is sufficient.” [1]
1. Nvidia Invests in Lab Of OpenAI Veteran. Keach Hagey. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 July 2026: B4.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą