Ilya Sutskever’s SSI hasn’t yet released a product, or even given any updates on what it’s doing, but there are some compelling reasons why it’s chosen this path.
In a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast, the former OpenAI Chief Scientist and Safe Superintelligence co-founder offered a surprisingly candid defense of his startup’s approach. While competitors race to deploy products and secure massive infrastructure deals, Sutskever argues that SSI’s $3 billion in funding—modest by today’s AI standards—may actually be more than sufficient for groundbreaking research. His reasoning reveals a fundamental tension in the AI industry: the gulf between what’s needed for research versus what’s required to run a commercial AI business.
“The amount of compute that SSI has for research is really not that small,” Sutskever explained. “SSI has raised $3 billion, which is a lot by any absolute sense. But you could say, ‘Look at the other companies raising much more.’ But a lot of their compute goes for inference. These big numbers, these big loans, it’s earmarked for inference. That’s number one.”
He continued: “Number two, if you want to have a product on which you do inference, you need to have a big staff of engineers, salespeople. A lot of the research needs to be dedicated to producing all kinds of product-related features. So then when you look at what’s actually left for research, the difference becomes a lot smaller.”
This distinction matters because it gets at the heart of SSI’s strategy. While companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are splitting resources between research breakthroughs and the operational demands of serving millions of users, SSI can dedicate virtually all its resources to the research itself because it thus far has no products, and no users. “If you are doing something different, do you really need the absolute maximal scale to prove it?” Sutskever asked. “I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that in our case, we have sufficient compute to prove, to convince ourselves and anyone else, that what we are doing is correct.”
When pressed on how SSI plans to eventually monetize its research, Sutskever was refreshingly blunt: “Right now, we just focus on the research, and then the answer to that question will reveal itself. I think there will be lots of possible answers.”
Sutskever’s perspective highlights a growing divide in AI development philosophies. His former employer OpenAI has raised $57 billion across 10 funding rounds, while Anthropic has raised over $27 billion. Large tech companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft have near-infinite budgets, and are all trying to acquire users.
SSI’s bet is that by avoiding these operational burdens entirely—at least for now—it can punch above its weight in pure research. Whether this monastic approach can compete with the massive scale of its rivals remains to be seen. But Sutskever’s track record suggests it would be foolish to count him out. After all, he was instrumental in many of OpenAI’s key breakthroughs before departing to chart his own course toward safe superintelligence.