OpenAI has produced the biggest tech product of the decade, and it now has the valuation to show for it.
OpenAI has completed a funding round which saw it raise $6.6 billion from a clutch of investors. The round valued OpenAI at $157 billion (Rs. 13 lakh crore). The round was led by Thrive Capital, which put in $1 billion, and saw participation from Microsoft, NVIDIA, Softbank and others. Interestingly, Apple, which was in talks to invest in OpenAI, did not participate in the funding round.
“The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems,” OpenAI said in a blogpost.
“We are making progress on our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Every week, over 250 million people around the world use ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity, and learning. Across industries, businesses are improving productivity and operations, and developers are leveraging our platform to create a new generation of applications. And we’re only getting started,” it added.
The new funding comes at the time when OpenAI has been going through some churn of its own. Just last week, OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati had abruptly resigned, and two other senior leaders had followed her out the same day. OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, meanwhile, had quit a few months ago had started his own startup, and President Greg Brockman is on leave till the end of the year.
But these aren’t the only issues that OpenAI is facing. OpenAI currently operates through a complex non-profit structure, which has caused some controversy and created difficulty in raising funds. It’s now looking to convert and become a fully for-profit company, but many commentators, including Elon Musk, have said that such a move would be illegal.
But while OpenAI’s valuation of $157 billion seems stratospheric, it does have some numbers to show for it. ChatGPT has 250 million weekly active users, and 11 million ChatGPT Plus subscribers. OpenAI generated revenue of $300 million last month, which was up 1,700% since the beginning of last year. It expects to generate $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024, and $11.7 billion in 2025. And apart from the numbers, it also has the tantalizing promise of AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence — if OpenAI can create a general intelligence, there might be no ceiling to how valuable the company can become.