Just now, Ilya Sutskever announced that he had appointed himself CEO: The co-founder was poached by Meta.

I sent the following message to our team and investors:

As you know, Daniel Gross's time at our company is coming to an end. Since June 29, he has officially left Safe Superintelligence (SSI). Thank him for his contributions to the company in its early days and wish him all the best in his future work.

I am now officially the CEO of SSI, and Daniel Levy is the President. The technical team will continue to report to me. You may have heard rumors that some companies are interested in acquiring us. We are honored by their attention, but we are more focused on doing our own work.

We have the computing power, we have the team, we know the direction forward, and we will continue to build safe superintelligence together.

Ilya's announcement confirms the rumor that Meta once tried to acquire SSI entirely. On the other hand, Daniel Gross's departure makes the future of this company, which has been established for nearly a year, even more uncertain.

SSI was founded in June last year. Apart from Ilya Sutskever, the other two co-founders are Daniel Gross, a former Apple AI executive and partner at Y-Combinator, and Daniel Levy, a former member of the OpenAI technical team.

Daniel Gross, Ilya Sutskever, and Daniel Levy.

As a star startup aiming to confront the ultimate goal of AI - superintelligence, SSI has carried people's hopes since its birth. Sutskever is regarded as a legendary figure for his outstanding contributions to the breakthrough progress in generative AI, and these achievements have attracted a large amount of financing for SSI. In April this year, SSI's valuation in a new round of $1 billion in financing had reached $32 billion.

However, perhaps because the goal is too focused and ambitious, we haven't seen SSI launch any technology or products yet. To make investors understand not to expect huge profits in the short term, SSI stated at the beginning of its establishment that it plans to "expand steadily" by isolating its progress from short - term commercial pressure to avoid interference from short - term goals.

People can only keep guessing what Ilya is doing, and SSI's minimalist website has also been a topic of much discussion:

It seems that Ilya's slogan of "making only one product" has been practiced all along.

After taking on the role of CEO, Sutskever may face more challenges. He not only has to continue to be responsible for SSI's technical team but also has to devote more attention to talent recruitment, financing, and other tasks.

On the other hand, after Ilya Sutskever's announcement, Daniel Gross also responded on X: "Ilya and Daniel have assembled an excellent team. I'm honored to have assisted SSI in getting started. The company's future is bright, and I'm looking forward to miracles happening."

In June, news spread in the industry that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in talks to acquire a stake in venture capital fund NFDG. NFDG holds shares in top artificial intelligence startups with a book value of billions of dollars, and one of its leaders, Daniel Gross, is a co - founder of Safe Superintelligence.