30 Billion ...

Image by Getty / Futurism

30 billion is the initial valuation of a startup titled Safe Superintelligence, founded by Open Ai's founder Ilya Sutskever. What's interesting about this is the fact SS hasn't a product nor is offering one as of yet.

That flair for hype is on full display at Sutskever's new venture, another AI outfit sporting
the un-subtle name of "Safe Superintelligence."

And if you were fretting that OpenAI's business model was suffering from Alice-in-Wonderland logic, Sutskever's new project will have you all the way through the looking glass. As the Financial Times flags, the company just raised another $1 billion, adding to previous investments from deep-pocketed investors at Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital and bringing its valuation up to $30 billion.

The wild thing? It's done all that — including attaining a valuation higher than Warner Bros, Nokia, or the Dow Chemical Company — without offering any product whatsoever. In fact, Sutskever has previously bragged, it will never offer a product — until, that is, it drops a fully-formed superintelligent AI at some unspecified point in the future.

"This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then," the erstwhile OpenAI-er told Bloomberg back when he first launched the operation. "It will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race."

This Gravity Wave simulation indirectly channels SS IMHO. :)