Computers Media: ChatGPT company wants 6.5 billion dollars from investors

Training and operating artificial intelligence is expensive. The development company behind ChatGPT now wants to fill its coffers with billions.

According to media reports, ChatGPT inventor OpenAI wants to raise 6.5 billion dollars in fresh money from investors. The AI company is to be valued at a total of 150 billion dollars, according to the New York Times and the financial service Bloomberg, citing informed sources.

The total valuation in such financing rounds is determined by the share of the company that investors receive for their money. At the end of August, OpenAI was reportedly aiming for a value of 100 billion dollars.

In addition, OpenAI is negotiating a credit line of five billion dollars with banks, Bloomberg wrote. So far, the AI company has mainly raised money from software giant Microsoft, which is said to have raised more than ten billion dollars.

Training AI models costs billions

Training AI models and operating them in huge data centers costs billions. And it is still unclear whether the business can pay for itself. Meanwhile, OpenAI is competing with other AI companies such as Anthropic and tech giants such as Google and the Facebook group Meta, which are developing their own models.

According to media reports, Apple and AI chip specialist Nvidia also want to participate in the new cash injection alongside Microsoft. It will be led by financial investor Thrive Capital.

ChatGPT is the chatbot that triggered the hype surrounding artificial intelligence over a year ago. Such AI programs are trained with huge amounts of information and can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human, write software code and summarize information. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should continue.