OpenAI has closed its long-awaited funding round at a valuation of $157 billion, including the $6.6 billion the company raised from an extensive roster of investment firms and big tech companies.<\/p>\n
While OpenAI didn\u2019t name the investors in Wednesday\u2019s press release, a person with knowledge of the matter said the round was led by Thrive Capital and included participation from existing backer\u00a0Microsoft\u00a0as well as chipmaker\u00a0Nvidia,\u00a0SoftBank\u00a0and others. Thrive planned to invest\u00a0$1 billion\u00a0in the round, CNBC previously reported.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s rapid ascent, which began with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, has been the biggest story in the tech industry over the last couple years, bringing the concept of generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream and paving the way for tens of billions of dollars of investments in AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d OpenAI wrote in a blog post Wednesday.<\/p>\n
OpenAI generated $300 million in revenue last month, up 1,700% since the beginning of last year, CNBC\u00a0confirmed\u00a0last week, following reporting by The New York Times. The company expects to bring in $11.6 billion in sales next year, up from $3.7 billion in 2024, according to a person close to OpenAI who asked not to be named because the financials are confidential.<\/p>\n
But all that revenue is extremely costly, as OpenAI has to ramp up purchases of Nvidia\u2019s graphics processing units (GPUs) to train and run its large language models. The company expects to lose about $5 billion this year, the person said. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and is a key partner as the software giant bolsters its Azure cloud business.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, OpenAI was valued at a reported $80 billion, up from $29 billion in 2023. Following the viral growth of ChatGPT, momentum has continued with new products for businesses and an expansion into AI-generated photos and videos.<\/p>\n
OpenAI now has 250 million weekly active users on ChatGPT, CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC in a statement. There are also 11 million ChatGPT Plus subscribers and 1 million paying business users on ChatGPT, a person close to the company said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is already personalizing learning, accelerating healthcare breakthroughs, and driving productivity,\u201d Friar said in the statement. \u201cAnd this is just the start.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI is experiencing plenty of growing pains along the way, including the loss of key executives, a trend that continued\u00a0through last week.<\/p>\n
Last Wednesday, OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, who briefly served as interim CEO, said she would be leaving after 6\u00bd years. Shortly after that, research chief Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, a research vice president, said they were leaving the company.<\/p>\n
In an interview the next day at Italian Tech Week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, \u201cI think this will be hopefully a great transition for everyone involved and I hope OpenAI will be stronger for it, as we are for all of our transitions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also on Thursday, OpenAI held an all-hands meeting, following the board\u2019s decision to consider restructuring the company to a\u00a0for-profit business, according to a separate person with knowledge of the matter. Altman said the departures were not related to the potential restructuring, contrary to some media reports.<\/p>\n
Should the change occur, the nonprofit segment would remain as a separate entity, the source said.<\/p>\n
At Thursday\u2019s meeting, Altman\u00a0denied reports of plans\u00a0for him to receive a \u201cgiant equity stake\u201d in the company, calling that information \u201cjust not true,\u201d according to a person who was in attendance.<\/p>\n
OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor told CNBC in a statement last week that while the board has talked about the matter, no specific figures are on the table.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe board has had discussions about whether it would be beneficial to the company and our mission to have Sam be compensated with equity, but no specific figures have been discussed nor have any decisions been made,\u201d Taylor said.<\/p>\n
The latest funding round also included participation from Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, MGX and Tiger Global, sources told CNBC.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
OpenAI has closed its long-awaited funding round at a valuation of $157 billion, including the $6.6 billion the company raised from an extensive roster of investment firms and big tech companies. While OpenAI didn\u2019t name the investors in Wednesday\u2019s press release, a person with knowledge of the matter said the round was led by Thrive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}