$1 Billion in 90 Days — Ilya Sutskever’s Record-Breaking AI Startup

Welcome, AI entrepreneurs & enthusiasts.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's new AI safety startup just raised a whopping $1 billion seed round, valuing it at $5 billion after only three months.

With SSI sitting on a pile of cash, a ‘cracked‘ team, and backing by tech’s most prolific investors — are we about to finally find out what Ilya saw? Let’s get into it…

In today’s AI news:

• OpenAI co-founder raises $1B for AI safety
• The fastest AI model goes multimodal
• AI gets smarter by re-reading questions
• More AI & tech news

Read time: 4 minutes

OpenAI co-founder raises $1B for AI safety

The News: Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a new AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, just raised $1 billion in funding to develop safe AI systems that surpass human intelligence.

The details:

• SSI plans to focus on AI safety, aiming to create superintelligent AI systems that are safe for humans and will spend years on R&D before bringing any product to market.
• Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy founded SSI just three months ago, and the company is now valued at $5 billion.
• The startup, which only has ten employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent.
• Investors include major venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

Why it matters: This is the first time a startup — that only came into existence three months ago — raised a whopping $1 billion dollars for a seed round. But it doesn’t come without reason, as Ilya Sutskever was one of the main reasons OpenAI is what it is today, and SSI is bound to attract some incredible talent.

The fastest AI model goes multimodal

The News: Groq just launched LLaVA v1.5 7B, a powerful, new multimodal AI model that can understand both images and text and reportedly runs 4x faster than OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

The details:

• LLaVA v1.5 7B can answer questions about images, generate captions, and engage in conversations involving text, voice, and pictures.
• The model can also be used for various tasks like visual product inspection, inventory management, and creating image descriptions for visually impaired users.
• This is Groq’s first venture into multimodal models and faster processing times on image, audio, and text inputs could lead to better AI assistants.
• Groq is currently offering this model for free in “Preview Mode” for developers to experiment with.

Why it matters: Groq went viral earlier this year for its blazing-fast AI speeds — and now it’s pairing those capabilities with powerful multimodal models. When it comes to AI apps, faster is always better, and the insane speeds paired with advanced models open the door for an endless supply of new applications.

AI gets smarter by re-reading questions

The News: Researchers have discovered that making AI systems ‘re-read‘ questions twice, mimicking human behavior, significantly improves their reasoning and problem-solving abilities across various tasks.

The details:

• The technique, called RE2 (Re-Reading), improves AI performance in math, common sense, and symbolic reasoning by simply repeating the question before answering.
• It works with different AI models and can be combined with other AI reasoning techniques.
• The method is most effective when repeating the question twice — more repetitions can decrease performance.
• RE2 even improved non-instruction-tuned AI models, showing broad applicability.

Why it matters: RE2 adds to the growing list of research showing the potential of mimicking the way humans think and process to improve AI. The simplicity of this research also suggests that many AI companies may be overlooking basic, human-inspired prompting techniques in the quest towards the highest performing model.

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QUICK HITS

Anthropic launched Claude Enterprise, competing with ChatGPT Enterprise by offering larger context windows and GitHub integration for businesses.

Google committed $10 million to improve AI literacy among young people in 17 countries and across 13 different languages.

Sakana AI raised $100M in Series A funding and announced a collaboration with Nvidia to advance AI research and infrastructure in Japan.

Salesforce agreed to acquire AI voice agent firm Tenyx to enhance its AI offerings, joining tech giants in the race for AI talent and technology.

A Samsung executive reportedly revealed GPT-5 specs, 3.5 trillion parameters and 7000 B100 GPUs for compute, at SEMICON Taiwan.

Microsoft announced Copilot+ AI features will expand to new laptops starting in November, broadening its AI capabilities beyond ARM-based devices.

You.com raised $50M to focus on AI productivity agents for complex queries, moving away from general AI search.

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