Ilya Sutskever officially named Safe Superintelligence CEO, shuts down acquisition rumors

Ilya Sutskever, the AI bigwig who left OpenAI last year to start Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has just posted on his X (formerly Twitter) account announcing the departure of CEO Daniel Gross, as of June 29, after he was poached by Meta following a failed attempt to buy SSI outright.

Sutskever said that he is now taking over as the CEO while Daniel Levy is taking on the role of President. Sutskever said that the technical team will continue to report to him.

It was reported in mid-June that Meta had tried to acquire SSI but was rejected in its offer, then it swooped in and made Daniel Gross an offer that he apparently could not refuse. Opening up about the issue in his X post, Sutskever said that SSI is flattered by the attention it received from Meta, but it’s focused on seeing its work through to the end.

For those that aren’t familiar, SSI was set up with a plan to reach artificial superintelligence that is safe and aligned with humanity. The company has not released any products yet and hasn’t been disclosing what it’s working on so we don’t know how far along it is in its work.

The company is more interested in working as a research institute right now, rather than getting involved in the highly competitive market dynamics. It’s a lot like how OpenAI started off before releasing ChatGPT to the world in 2022.

Sutskever said that SSI has the compute power, the talent, and it knows what to do and together, they plan to keep plugging away to achieve the overall goal of artificial superintelligence that aligns with human values.

The fact that the company knows how to achieve its objective is an interesting detail, it could suggest that superintelligence is not too far away and that SSI has already done the required research needed to achieve superintelligence, or at least has an outline.

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