Ilya Sutskever's SSI is raising $1B+ on $30B valuation

AI just represents a new class of business, that doesn't need consumers or revenue or business plans.

Traditionally you want to build a moat with name recognition, established customer base etc. OpenAI has absorbed huge losses to serve consumers at below inference cost.

But its not clear if that has advantaged OpenAI or not. Turns out most AI customers are only loyal to the most intelligent model. So if a competitor releases a better model, the shift away can be extremely rapid.

So SSI probably is a bet on that, to just develop the model in private, and not waste time and energy on deployment, name recognition, go to market, enterprise sales etc. Have a decisive model advantage, and customers will crash your door trying to get it.

He still hasn't listed a job posting, or really produced a project anyone can take advantage of. Ilya seems like a cool dude but this valuation makes no sense (at least from what public information exists)