$1B in value per employee

As even the rocks know, the key driver for economic growth is productivity.

There are several metrics for business productivity, being revenues per employee a popular one. Another insightful metric is market value per employee. By this measure, Nvidia is probably the most productive company on the planet, boasting a market value of around $100M per employee.

And since we are at it, which company will be the first to achieve a staggering $1B in market value per employee? SSI might be a candidate.

This week, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), newly co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever (37), announced it has raised $1B in cash to help develop safe AI systems. According to sources the company was valued at $5B. With SSI currently employing 10 people, its market value productivity stands at $500M per employee!

As discussed in a previous post (https://bigzinbigapple.com/f/situational-awareness), there will be tremendous safety risks and challenges around and during the artificial intelligence explosion. It won’t be an easy task to ensure that we can reliably control and trust the billions of superintelligent agents that will soon be ahead of the economy (and military) – known as the superalignment problem.

Most western AI labs claim to be committed to safety, acknowledging that what they are building, if gone awry, could cause disaster, and promising that they will do what is necessary to avoid jailbreaking when the time comes. However, Ilya believed that OpenAI’s guard railing efforts were insufficient and left the company to create SSI with the mission of preventing AI from causing harm.

For this, Ilya is building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers, spending hours and hours examining if the candidates have “good character”.

It was also important for SSI “to be surrounded by investors who understand, respect and support our mission, which is to make a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market”.

Conclusion

$1B in value per employee does seem unattainable after “maturation”.

However, Ilya demonstrated that genuine natural intelligence precedes artificial.