Alphabet, NVIDIA invest in OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's AI start-up
What's the story
Google's parent Alphabet and tech giant NVIDIA have invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an artificial intelligence start-up by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
The investment highlights a renewed interest from major tech firms in start-ups that are pushing the boundaries of AI technology.
To note, SSI has quickly emerged as one of the most valuable AI start-ups since its inception.
Funding
Valuation of SSI
SSI was recently valued at $32 billion in a funding round led by Greenoaks.
The start-up is one of the leading AI model research firms, primarily because of Sutskever's remarkable track record of predicting major leaps in AI development.
The exact terms of Alphabet's and NVIDIA's investment in SSI remain unknown.
Strategic partnership
Alphabet's cloud division partners with SSI
Alphabet's cloud computing division has teamed up with SSI to offer access to Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Google's proprietary AI chips.
The move marks a shift in Google's AI hardware strategy, as it starts selling chips in bulk to external customers for advanced AI research.
Previously, TPUs were reserved for internal use, but now they are being offered via Google Cloud.
Chip choice
SSI's chip preference
Despite NVIDIA's dominance in the AI chips market (with over 80% share with its GPUs), SSI mainly uses TPUs for its AI research and development.
Google offers both NVIDIA GPUs and its own TPUs through its cloud service.
Google's TPUs are tailored for certain AI tasks and are more efficient than general-purpose GPUs.