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on august 29, according to people familiar with the matter,aistartupsOpenAIa new round is being promotedfinancing, aims to raise billions of dollars in funding and boost its valuation to more than $100 billion.

in this round of financing, venture capital giant thrive capital will serve as the lead investor, with an estimated investment of approximately us$1 billion.microsoftit is also expected to continue to increase investment.

the investment would be the largest infusion of outside capital for openai since microsoft corp. invested about $10 billion in january 2023, underscoring its momentum in the field of artificial intelligence, a field that comes as competition in silicon valley heats up as companies race to build cutting-edge ai systems and dominate an industry that many believe will revolutionize the economy.

it is worth noting that openai's valuation reached us$86 billion in its last round of financing at the end of last year, when some employees sold their shares.

thrive capital, founded 15 years ago by josh kushner, has a close working relationship with openai and its ceo sam altman, and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in openai since last year.

it is not yet clear which other investors participated in this new round of financing.

competition in the field of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly fierce. not only has google launched its own artificial intelligence products, but it has also invested $6 billion with amazon in anthropic, a competitor founded by former openai executives. meta is also not to be outdone, independently developing and releasing advanced artificial intelligence models for free, and integrating them into popular applications such as facebook and instagram.

chatgpt remains the market leader, attracting hundreds of millions of users per month. to maintain this lead, openai will need to invest billions of dollars to ensure it remains at the forefront of research and continues to develop innovative products that can understand natural language commands and generate high-quality text, images, and videos.

high-price private equity transactions

new disclosures show that one or more of openai’s current shareholders have recently been in talks to sell their shares in transactions that would value the company at about $103 billion. any new investors are expected to be valued at that level or higher, and do not take into account additional funds that may be raised in the future.

for altman, raising huge amounts of money is key to realizing his vision of general artificial intelligence, which is to build autonomous systems that can outperform humans in most economic tasks. achieving this ambitious goal requires relying on clusters of supercomputers to process massive amounts of data, and these computers rely on expensive and energy-intensive chips. openai has invested more than $100 million to build its most powerful artificial intelligence model, gpt-4, and the next generation of models currently under development are expected to cost even more.

despite high hopes for artificial intelligence, which is seen as a technology that will revolutionize the way humans and businesses work and create, it remains a highly speculative field, with revenues far from what investors and tech companies are investing in. earlier this year, openai's annual revenue reached $3.4 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

microsoft's friend and foe

openai is unique in that it is a non-profit organization. investors do not directly hold shares in it, but participate by investing in its for-profit subsidiaries and enjoy the right to share in the profits of the subsidiaries.

microsoft has invested $13 billion in openai since 2019, earning a 49% share of the company's profits as a result. some of the money flows back to microsoft because openai hosts its technology on the tech giant's azure cloud platform.

the fact that microsoft continues to invest in openai shows how important the partnership is to both parties, even as competition in the industry intensifies and new partnerships form.

in july, microsoft voluntarily withdrew from its non-voting seat on openai’s board, a move that was seen in part as a response to regulators’ scrutiny of their relationship, and microsoft recently named openai as one of its competitors in artificial intelligence and search in regulatory filings.

it is worth noting that microsoft is also making frequent moves to expand its artificial intelligence layout. earlier this year, microsoft recruited the ceo and core team of openai competitor inflection ai to focus on developing consumer-grade artificial intelligence tools. microsoft ceo satya nadella has been betting on multiple artificial intelligence startups.

at the same time, openai is working with apple to inject cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities into the next generation of iphones. (xiaoxiao)