A month after he left OpenAI amid disagreements regarding the safety of the company's products, Dr. Ilya Sutskever announced a new venture called Safe Superintelligence (SSI). “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” read the new company's announcement also signed by fellow co-founders Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. “We have started the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence. It’s called Safe Superintelligence. SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus. Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned to achieve SSI.”

The founders of SSI have deep ties to Israel. Sutskever (37) was born in the USSR before immigrating to Jerusalem at the age of 5. He began his academic studies at the Open University but completed all his degrees at the University of Toronto, where he earned a doctorate in machine learning under the guidance of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the early pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).