OpenAI has reached a deal with investors that values the Californian startup at at least $80 billion, according to the New York Times, following an extravagant but eventful year for the ChatGPT inventor. The confidential operation, not confirmed by OpenAI, means that the value of this leading company in artificial intelligence (AI) has almost tripled in less than 10 months, according to sources from the American newspaper.
The deal calls for the San Francisco-based company to sell existing shares to investors, led by Thrive Capital, according to the report released Friday. It allows managers and employees to sell shares at a very favorable price, three months after a major crisis for OpenAI, when its co-founder and boss Sam Altman was fired and reinstated in a few days.
OpenAI brought its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence software online at the end of 2022. The success of this interface has sparked unprecedented enthusiasm for this cutting-edge technology, capable of producing text, sounds and images through a simple request in everyday language.
Fierce competition
Microsoft, which is already an investor in the new company, has worked hard. The IT giant has pumped around $13 billion into OpenAI in recent years. It competes fiercely with Google in the development and deployment of generative AI tools, to the point that the US competition authority announced in January the start of an investigation into the dantesque investments of Microsoft, Google and Amazon in specialized startups. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, OpenAI went through a major crisis last November. Its board of directors thanked CEO Sam Altman, a charismatic Silicon Valley figure, accusing him of not having been “transparent.”
In the following days, Microsoft offered to hire him, while the majority of OpenAI executives and employees demanded the resignation of the directors and the return of the boss, threatening to leave the company if not. In less than a week, Sam Altman was back in charge.
On Friday, ChatGPT editor and image generator DALL-E introduced a new tool, called “Sora,” capable of creating realistic on-demand videos that can be up to a minute long. According to the New York Times, OpenAI had already reached a similar deal early last year with venture capital firms including Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which increased its value to $29 billion.
Source: BFM TV
