Is the Place to Invent AI Moving Outside of Companies?
Star researchers are leaving corporate labs to launch independent AI research companies. Ilya Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI), Mira Murati started Thinking Machines Lab, David Silver created Ineffable Intelligence, and Yann LeCun opened Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs. These firms align investors, governance and research goals, often isolating work from short‑term…
Key points
- Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion seed funding with Sequoia, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Google and UK funds
- SSI and Thinking Machines secured multi‑year NVIDIA partnerships for Vera Rubin GPU systems
- FTC is investigating Microsoft‑OpenAI, Amazon‑Anthropic and Google‑Anthropic investment and cloud contracts
Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1 billion in seed funding in April 2026 from Sequoia, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Google and UK government‑backed funds. SSI and Thinking Machines announced multi‑year partnerships with NVIDIA, gaining access to next‑generation “Vera Rubin” GPU systems and co‑designing training infrastructure. Amazon pledged $50 billion to OpenAI for AWS “Trainium” chips, while Google expands TPU access to external cloud customers. The FTC is probing investment and cloud contracts between Microsoft‑OpenAI, Amazon‑Anthropic and Google‑Anthropic for antitrust concerns. Google also committed at least €13 billion to build three Finnish data centers and signed a 22‑year power contract with Fortum for up to 50 % of a nuclear plant’s output.
These developments show capital, compute and policy converging around a few star researchers, reshaping how large‑scale AI research is funded, built and regulated.
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Is the Place to Invent AI Moving Outside of Companies?
note.com · 5 October 2026
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