Ilya’s secret ASI roadmap

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. What did Ilya see? Potentially a brand new path to ASI that is price betting billions on — despite no product or revenue stream.

With investors able to value his secretive company at $30B based on a “different mountain to climb,” is the previous OpenAI co-founder sitting on a breakthrough that might rewrite the AI roadmap?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Ex-OpenAI scientist’s recent path to ASI

• Microsoft seeking to move beyond OpenAI

• Making viral posts 10x faster with AI

• Stanford AI’s obesity treatment breakthrough

• 4 recent AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

SAFE SUPERINTELLIGENCE INC.

🗺️ Ex-OpenAI scientist’s recent path to ASI

The Rundown: Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s startup Protected Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is reportedly raising $2B at a $30B valuation—with the researcher hinting at a unique approach to achieving advanced AI than all other rivals.

The small print:

• Sutskever reportedly told investors he has identified a totally recent direction for AI development, describing it as “a unique mountain to climb.”

• Based on the Wall Street Journal, SSI is in talks for funding at a valuation of $30B, despite having no revenue or public-facing product.

• The corporate is just not planning to release any industrial products prior to achieving superintelligence and operates leanly with just 20 employees.

• Sutskever departed OpenAI within the months following the Nov. 2023 ouster of Sam Altman, later saying he “regretted his participation” within the board’s actions.

Why it matters: SSI has no shortage of investors despite the dearth of immediate plans for a revenue-generating product. But a contrarian bet on a wholly recent path could reshape how we take into consideration achieving ASI — with the subsequent breakthrough potentially coming from rethinking AI’s foundations moderately than simply continuing to scale models.

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MICROSOFT

👀 Microsoft seeking to move beyond OpenAI

The Rundown: Microsoft is reportedly developing MAI, a brand new family of AI models that rivals current industry leaders — alongside the build-out of its own in-house reasoning models to cut back reliance on OpenAI for its Copilot suite.

The small print:

• The brand new MAI models reportedly match top offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, with the corporate planning to supply them through Azure.

• They’re being tested as replacements for OpenAI’s tech in Copilot while also experimenting with alternatives from xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek.

• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman reportedly grew frustrated last fall with OpenAI’s refusal to share the inner workings of its o1 reasoning model.

• OpenAI also renegotiated a deal in January with Microsoft, allowing for using other server providers, adding to growing tension between the businesses.

Why it matters: Despite Microsoft’s $13B investment in OpenAI, the connection has felt contentious for a very long time. While the tech giant could have felt beholden when OpenAI was a transparent leader, competition has increased significantly — and an internal rival model will surely change the dynamic much more.

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🚀 Making viral posts 10x faster with AI

The Rundown: Blotato is an all-in-one AI content tool that helps you create, remix, and distribute AI-optimized content across multiple platforms, accelerating your brand presence 10x faster.

Step-by-step:

1. Enroll for a free account at blotato.com.

2. Import content from any source—e.g., YouTube, TikTok, PDF, podcast—or type your personal preferred topic.

3. Select your goal social platforms to generate viral-optimized posts tailored to each.

4. Customize the drafts together with your insights, add AI images or faceless videos, after which publish to all social platforms seamlessly!

Pro tip:

You may also schedule your content calendar upfront to take care of consistent posting across all platforms while saving hours of manual work each week.

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• Gather customer info 24/7 through personalized cross-channel conversations

• Automate tasks like form-filling, call handling, and scheduling

• Define how your agent responds based on customer triggers and sentiment

• Customize responses and language to suit your brand

Discover the long run of customer support with Jotform AI Agents.

AI RESEARCH

💊 Stanford AI’s obesity treatment breakthrough

The Rundown: Stanford researchers just discovered a natural molecule called BRP that matches Ozempic’s weight reduction powers but with fewer negative effects—using AI to unlock a possible breakthrough in obesity treatment.

The small print:

• BRP targets specific brain regions as an alternative of affecting multiple organs, potentially avoiding common Ozempic negative effects like nausea and muscle loss.

• In animal tests, a single dose of BRP cut food intake by half in each mice and minipigs, with obese mice losing significant fat over two weeks of treatment.

• Stanford’s “Peptide Predictor” AI system sifted through 20,000 human genes, analyzing hundreds of potential candidates, to seek out the natural molecule.

• An organization has already been created to start human trials, with researcher Katrin Svensson suggesting that BRP could revolutionize weight reduction treatment.

Why it matters: While much of the AI healthcare buzz has focused on diagnosis and drug design, Stanford’s breakthrough shows how AI can unlock recent medicines hidden in nature. This success to find a natural alternative to a blockbuster drug could spark a wave of AI-powered discoveries in our biology.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 📜 Mistral OCR – SOTA API for extracting text from images or documents

• 🤖 Manus AI – Fully autonomous AI agent able to handling real-world tasks

• 🗣️ Tavus – Conversational Video Interface to bring AI agents to life

• 💡 Template Hub – Marketplace to create, share, deploy specialized AI agents

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 📒 DeepL – General Ledger Accountant

• 🤝 OpenAI – Global Strategic Partnerships Lead

• 🔐 Deepmind – Software Engineer, Privacy & Security (USA)

• 📈 Glean – SLED Account Executive

📰 Every thing else in AI today

Former DeepMind researchers launched Reflection AI with $130M in funding, aiming to construct autonomous coding systems as a stepping stone to superintelligent AI.

X added functionality for users to have the option to ask Grok questions by tagging an automatic @Grok account, joining Perplexity in providing quick access.

Alibaba researchers published START, a brand new tool-integrated reasoning model that significantly enhances LLM capabilities through code execution and self-checking.

Hedra unveiled Character-3, an ‘omnimodal model’ able to reasoning across image, text, and audio to create high-quality video generations.

Luma Labs released Ray2 Flash, a new edition of its top-tier video generation model that brings 3x faster speed and lower costs.

Sudowrite introduced Muse, a brand new AI model trained for fiction writing that features advanced storytelling capabilities and longer attention for chapter-length outputs.

Sam Altman’s World Network released World Chat, an encrypted mini-app that enables users to talk, connect, and send money with verified humans.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team