By and large, there aren’t many of the senior executives left on the OpenAI staff who were at the origins of the startup that gave the world ChatGPT. Ilya Sutskever, for example, founded his own company, SSI, after leaving OpenAI. Its capital has already been invested in by investors, including Nvidia and Alphabet, with the latter intending to offer SSI its TPU computing accelerators.
This was reported by Reuters, citing its own sources. Independently of the deal to invest in SSI capital, Google reported reaching an agreement with Sutskever’s startup to provide it with access to cloud computing power built on TPU accelerators.
SSI’s capitalization is estimated at $32 billion, making it the fastest growing startup in the AI field. Investors value the experience of Ilya Sutskever, who headed research and development processes at OpenAI and also formed the development strategy. Reuters sources do not report how much exactly Nvidia and Alphabet invested in SSI’s capital. The latter corporation simultaneously supports the Anthropic startup, thereby diversifying its investment risks in this area.
For Alphabet, the SSI deal was another chance to increase the supply of TPU accelerators to third parties, since they were originally created by Google for the holding company’s own needs. Traditionally, AI developers have relied more on Nvidia accelerators, but SSI stands out in that it relies primarily on Google hardware. In Google’s cloud infrastructure, however, TPU accelerators are combined with Nvidia solutions.
SSI’s rival Anthropic, also founded by OpenAI alumni in 2021, uses not only TPU accelerators, but also relies on Amazon (AWS) solutions of its own design. In December, the partners announced that Anthropic would be the first AWS customer to gain access to significant computing power built on AWS chips of its own design. At the same time, the startup does not reduce the costs of purchasing Google TPU accelerators. Like Google, Amazon’s cloud division is an investor in Anthropic. It is logical that Nvidia, Google, and SSI have similar relationships. At the same time, Nvidia invests not only in OpenAI, but also in xAI, founded by Elon Musk.