{"text":[[{"start":10.04,"text":"Nvidia has agreed a $5bn investment in Safe Superintelligence, the secretive artificial intelligence start-up led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, deepening the chipmaker’s ties with one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched AI companies."}],[{"start":25.58,"text":"The Silicon Valley group and SSI announced the deal on Monday as part of a “long-term partnership” that will see the start-up use Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin hardware."}],[{"start":35.62,"text":"The $4.75tn chipmaker has agreed to invest around $5bn, according to people briefed on the terms of the deal. Such large commitments are typically contingent on the start-up hitting certain milestones."}],[{"start":47.88,"text":"The two companies declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal, saying only that the investment was “substantial”."}],[{"start":53.86,"text":"The funds will help SSI to build the computing capacity needed to capitalise on what it says is a research breakthrough."}],[{"start":60.9,"text":"“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so,” Sutskever said on Monday."}],[{"start":68.98,"text":"The investment will allow SSI to increase its available computing power 10-fold over the next 12 months, the company said."}],[{"start":76.5,"text":"The investment is the latest in a series of circular financing deals between AI chipmakers and model developers. Last week, Nvidia rival AMD said it would invest up to $5bn in Anthropic."}],[{"start":88.5,"text":"The start-up, which still has only a few dozen employees, has been working on a new approach to AI research that breaks with the approach underpinning large language models developed by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic."}],[{"start":99.94,"text":"SSI was previously valued at $32bn last year when it raised $2bn from investors including Greenoaks, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Nvidia is an existing investor in the company."}],[{"start":113.02,"text":"Despite its lofty valuation and high-profile talent, little is known about what it is working on. The start-up is yet to release its first product or publish any research. Sutskever told the FT in 2024 that he and his team had “identified a new mountain to climb that’s a bit different from what I was working on previously”."}],[{"start":130.7,"text":"Jensen Huang, Nvidia chief executive, said Sutskever had already “pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI”."}],[{"start":139.84,"text":"“We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform,” he added, referring to the latest generation of its AI systems."}],[{"start":150.7,"text":"Nvidia has previously agreed similar large-scale investments with some of its biggest customers, including OpenAI and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab."}],[{"start":160.18,"text":"Widely regarded as one of the leading AI researchers of his generation, Sutskever was instrumental in the creation of the technology that led to the breakthrough launch of ChatGPT in 2022."}],[{"start":171.64,"text":"He co-founded SSI in 2024 after being closely involved in a boardroom coup against OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman the previous year. Altman was quickly reinstated as CEO and Sutskever left OpenAI six months later."}],[{"start":188.26,"text":"Sutskever was one of the first AI engineers to grasp the so-called “scaling law” that showed LLMs became more capable with more data and computing power."}],[{"start":198.24,"text":"In November, he suggested that the returns from that approach were diminishing. “Now that compute is big, compute is now very big, in some sense we are back to the age of research,” Sutskever said in a podcast interview."}],[{"start":211.5,"text":"Bloomberg previously reported details of the latest financing."}],[{"start":220.24,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1785197660_9455.mp3"}