ChatGPT Owner Company Valued at $80 Billion

OpenAI - the owner of ChatGPT - has just completed a deal that values the company at $80 billion or more.

Specifically, OpenAI will sell its existing shares in a public offering led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital. Under the deal, employees will be able to cash out their company shares instead of a traditional funding round to raise money for the business.

The value of the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence (AI) technology developer has nearly tripled in less than 10 months, making OpenAI one of the world's most valuable tech startups, behind TikTok owner ByteDance and SpaceX, according to data tracking firm CB Insights.

OpenAI logo graphic. Photo: Reuters

OpenAI was founded in 2015 and has received several large investments from many technology companies. In particular, Microsoft has poured a total of 13 billion USD into OpenAI, but said it does not own any shares in this startup, but "receives a portion of the profits shared".

In late 2022, the company launched ChatGPT and made a splash in the Generative AI space. By April 2023, Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and K2 Global agreed to buy new shares of OpenAI in a tender offer that valued the company at around $29 billion.

In November 2023, the company’s board of directors decided to fire CEO Sam Altman, saying they had lost confidence in his leadership. The move sparked a week of turmoil for OpenAI and threw the company’s future into doubt as employees who supported Altman threatened to resign. Ultimately, Sam Altman returned to the CEO position and several board members resigned.

In an effort to address the turmoil, OpenAI has hired the law firm WilmerHale to review the board’s operations and Altman’s leadership. WilmerHale expects to complete its report early this year.

Following ChatGPT, OpenAI has just released Sora, a model that generates videos from text or images and is gaining attention in the community for its high fidelity. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long, with multiple characters, various types of motion in both the foreground and background, from just text commands, or from still images.

"We are teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion. The goal is to build models that help humans solve real-world interaction needs," OpenAI said on February 15.

Phien An ( according to Reuters, NYT )

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