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- Sutskever's SSI Raises Another $2B 💰
Sutskever's SSI Raises Another $2B 💰
How to build full apps from scratch in minutes for free
Gina Acosta
April 14, 2025
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
Just a few days ago, we covered former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati raising one of the largest rounds for an AI startup. Now it’s Ilya Sutskever’s turn. His new company, Safe Superintelligence, has reportedly secured another massive round — with no product yet.
Let’s jump into it!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Raises $2B at $32B Valuation
ByteDance’s New Reasoning Model: Seed-Thinking-v1.5
AI Tutorial: How to build full apps from scratch in minutes for free
AI Tools to check out
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI Findings/Resources
AI News
SSI
Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Raises $2B at $32B Valuation
OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's new AI startup has reportedly raised an additional $2 billion in funding, bringing its valuation to $32 billion.
Details:
The funding round was led by Greenoaks Capital, which invested $500 million. Other backers include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.
Sutskever co-founded SSI in June 2024 alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, saying, "The company has one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence."
SSI's approach focuses exclusively on its single goal, avoiding short-term commercial pressures and product competition—an approach that has attracted significant investment, even without current revenue or product offerings.
According to Sutskever, SSI isn’t developing advanced AI using the same methods he and his colleagues used at OpenAI, stating that he has instead identified a “different mountain to climb.”
Neither SSI nor Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has offered a clear justification for their billion-dollar valuations, both relying on established reputations and the assumption that a combination of talent and capital will eventually produce major technological results — at least investors seem willing to accept that premise.
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The Science City You Didn’t Know You Needed to Visit
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Next time you're in Geneva, go beyond the scenic lake and charming Old Town—dive into the future at CERN’s Science Gateway.
BYTEDANCE
ByteDance’s New Reasoning Model: Seed-Thinking-v1.5
ByteDance has announced its latest AI model, Seed-Thinking-v1.5, marking its entry into the competitive field of reasoning large language models.
Details:
The model is built upon a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that is designed to make models more efficient. This architecture allows Seed-Thinking-v1.5 to use only 20 billion of its 200 billion parameters at a time.
ByteDance claims in its technical paper that its new model prioritizes structured reasoning and thoughtful response generation.
Benchmark evaluations indicate that it outperforms DeepSeek R1 and approaches the performance levels of Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o3-mini-high. Notably, it surpasses both on the ARC-AGI benchmark, which assesses progress toward artificial general intelligence.
The model isn’t yet available for download or use, and the licensing terms remain unclear—whether it will be proprietary, open-source, or something in between.
AI Tutorial
How to build full apps from scratch in minutes for free
Google recently released Firebase Studio, an app that lets you build, modify, and deploy any app using natural language, all in one place — and, unlike alternatives like Cursor and Bolt, it’s completely free.
Go to the Firebase Studio website and sing in with your Google account.
Enter your prompt
For example: 'Create an app that turns a theme or topic into a mind map.'
Firebase Studio will create a feature list, choose a color palette, and decide on a layout and animation.
You can edit these, and once you're satisfied, click ‘Prototype this App.’
Wait a few seconds, and once the prototype is ready, you can start testing it.
You can make changes to the design, fix issues, and add features all just through chat, using natural language.
When done, export the code or deploy it directly with Firebase Studio.
AI Tools to check out
👉 SimplAI: Create scalable, secure, and reliable AI agents and agentic automations to transform your enterprise for the AI-native world
🎨 Midjourney V7: Create images, paintings, digital art, logos and much more simply by writing a prompt.
📊 Supaboard: Get instant answers, live dashboards, reports, and actionable insights with this AI data analytics platform.
🌐 Readdy: Build your dream websites by talking with AI, no Drag-and-Drop needed.
👀 Latitude agents: Design, evaluate, and deploy truly autonomous AI agents integrated with your tools and data
AI Findings/Resources
👨⚖️ The biggest trial in Meta's history starts Monday. Here's what to know
💼 9 business leaders on what's possible with Google AI
🤖 Meet NEO, a robot butler in training
The latest in AI and Tech
The feature was announced last year, but its rollout has been repeatedly delayed due to privacy and security concerns. It is designed to enhance user productivity by capturing screenshots of on-screen activities, allowing users to retrace their steps and access past content.
It is gradually rolling out on Windows 11 as an opt-in feature.
The company has secured over one million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. In Arizona, production of Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips has commenced at TSMC's facility in Phoenix. In Texas, Nvidia is collaborating with Foxconn to establish a manufacturing plant in Houston and with Wistron for a facility in Dallas.
A group of twelve former OpenAI employees has filed an amicus brief supporting Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI's planned transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit corporation. The brief argues that this restructuring would violate OpenAI's original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.
OpenAI is introducing a "Verified Organization" process requiring organizations to complete an ID verification to access certain future AI models. The initiative seems aimed at enhancing security and preventing misuse of OpenAI's API services or simply preventing IP theft.
Hugging Face plans to sell Pollen’s humanoid robot, Reachy 2, and allow developers to download and suggest improvements to its code. The financial terms were not disclosed.
That’s a wrap!
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Gina 👩🏻💻