Ambitious goals OpenAI co-founder wants to develop harmless superintelligence

One of the founders of ChatGPT inventor OpenAI is setting up his own AI start-up. Ilya Sutskever announced on Wednesday that the aim of the new company, called Safe Superintelligence, is to create safe, highly developed artificial intelligence.

"The special thing about the company is that its first product will be Safe Superintelligence - and it won't release anything else before that," Sutskever told the financial service Bloomberg. The researcher argued that this would avoid commercial pressure and a race with other AI labs.

Sutskever is regarded as one of the leading minds in the development of artificial intelligence. He has two co-founders at Safe Superintelligence: Daniel Gross once worked on artificial intelligence at Apple and Daniel Levy once worked with Sutskever at OpenAI.

The question of whether AI systems could become dangerous for humanity once they become more powerful and autonomous has been occupying the industry for years. There have been repeated warnings from experts and attempts by governments to minimize risks through strict regulations and reporting obligations.

Return to the roots

Sutskever was Head of Research at OpenAI. Last year, he was involved in the surprising dismissal of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which was reversed just a few days later after pressure from employees and major investor Microsoft. Sutskever then remained in the background and left the ChatGPT developer in May.

The vision for the new company is something of a return to OpenAI's roots as a not-for-profit research lab. However, a few years after its foundation, OpenAI came to the conclusion that it would not be able to stay afloat without a commercial product. This led to a multi-billion dollar pact with software giant Microsoft and the release of ChatGPT. It remains unclear how Sutskever's new superintelligence lab will be financed.