OpenAI co-founder’s AI startup to be backed by Alphabet, Nvidia

In a surprising development, two of the prominent tech giants Alphabet and Nvidia have joined venture capital investors in backing a startup co-founded by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever named Safe Superintelligence (SSI).

These partnerships between tech giants and AI startups highlight the growing importance of AI in the tech industry.

It should be noted that SSI has quickly become one of the most valuable artificial intelligence (AI) startups, with a recent valuation of $32 billion.

This funding has highlighted renewed interest from big tech companies in making strategic investments in startups developing cutting-edge AI.

Notably, Alphabet's cloud computing arm has also announced a deal to provide SSI with access to its tensor processing units (TPUs), and in-house AI chips.

SSI's demand for chips is significant, and the startup is primarily using TPUs for its AI research and development.

Meanwhile, Google's TPUs are designed to excel at specific AI tasks and are more efficient than general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs).

The deal between Alphabet and SSI has showcased the company's evolving AI hardware strategy. For the unversed, Google and Nvidia dominate the AI chip market, but Amazon is building its competing processors called Trainium and Inferentia.