Computers Media - OpenAI wants 100 billion dollar valuation for ChatGPT

ChatGPT inventor OpenAI is aiming for a total valuation of 100 billion dollars (approx. 84 billion Swiss francs) in a new financing round, according to media reports.

Keystone-SDA

29.08.2024, 04:45

SDA

So far, the AI company has mainly raised money from software giant Microsoft, which is said to have raised more than ten billion dollars. ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot. The current financing round is being led by investor Thrive Capital, which intends to contribute one billion dollars, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, among others, citing informed sources. Microsoft also wants to invest again. At the same time, the conditions could still change, the Bloomberg financial service qualified in its report.

Valuation like Facebook in the past

The overall valuation of such financial injections is determined by the share of the company that investors receive for their money. Facebook, for example, was also valued at a similar level before its IPO in 2012. Some other start-ups were later unable to maintain their billion-euro valuations. 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.

AI race with billions invested

An AI race has broken out in Silicon Valley in recent years. Teaching the software requires a massive computer infrastructure and can quickly swallow up billions. These are amounts of money that tech giants in particular have at their disposal. Google and the Facebook group Meta, among others, are investing heavily in their own AI models. At the same time, the heavyweights are also putting money into start-ups. For example, Anthropic, one of OpenAI's strongest competitors with the chatbot Claude, raised billions from Google and Amazon, among others.