Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, has announced he is starting a new company a month after leaving the ChatGPT developer.

In an announcement on X, Sutskever said that the new business will focus on building safe superintelligence (SSI.)

The new company, called Safe Superintelligence, says that it will be “the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab”, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.

Sutskever has co-founded the company in the US with Daniel Levy – a former OpenAI employee – and AI investor Daniel Gross, who worked at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up incubator that chief executive of OpenAI Sam Altman used to run.

Safe Superintelligence said that SSI is “the most important technical problem of our time,” adding that the company’s singular focus means there will be “no distraction by management overhead or product cycles.”

The company says it has taken steps to protect its business model from short-term commercial pressures.

Earlier this month, billionaire Elon Musk withdrew his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman just days before the case was set to be heard in a California court.

The Tesla boss had accused OpenAI of abandoning its original non-profit mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity, instead pursuing profits.

---