Nvidia has entered into a major long-term strategic partnership with Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the high-profile AI research startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. As part of the agreement, Nvidia has made a ‘substantial’ direct investment in SSI and will grant the startup early access to its next-generation Vera Rubin computing platform. According to an announcement made by the US-based chipmaker, the deal aims to boost SSI’s processing power by an order of magnitude as it pursues breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). In return, the two companies will collaborate on optimising Nvidia’s future hardware platforms by leveraging SSI’s technical insights into advanced AI architectures.
Nvidia to gain rare access to SSI’s AI research
Nvidia reportedly agreed to the partnership and investment after receiving rare insight into SSI’s private operations. For the past two years, SSI has been quietly developing a novel research direction aimed at building powerful, robustly aligned AI systems.The collaboration will combine Nvidia’s cutting-edge hardware with SSI’s specialised algorithmic research to accelerate the startup’s next phase of development.
What the Nvidia and SSI CEOs said
Leaders from both companies expressed high expectations for what the joint effort will yield for the future of artificial intelligence.“Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet. “We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so. We’re incredibly proud to be partnering with Jensen and the Nvidia team, and we are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level,” said Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and CEO of SSI.
