2024-10-03 07:35:34
The numbers are impressive. Artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI announced on Wednesday 2 October that it has completed a $6.6 billion (€6 billion) fundraising round, valuing it at $157 billion.
The creator of the conversational robot ChatGPT thus completes the largest round of venture capital investments, exceeding the 6 billion dollars raised by xAi, Elon Musk’s AI start-up, according to the American information site Axios. And the company led by Sam Altman is approaching a record valuation for an unlisted company, surpassed only by the parent company of the Chinese social network TikTok, ByteDance, and Elon Musk’s space company, SpaceX, according to the Financial times. The funding round includes the Thrive Capital fund, as well as Microsoft, Nvidia, Softbank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, Tiger Global and MGX, notes Axios.
But, paradoxically, despite the superlatives, this fundraising also reflects the challenges OpenAI faces. This means that OpenAI still needs funding, despite Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in early 2023 ($13 billion total as of 2019). “It will allow us to consolidate our leadership in cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, increase our computing power and build new tools to help people solve difficult problems”justifies the company in its press release.
Training and managing large artificial intelligence models is, in fact, very expensive, especially in computational terms. Second The information, OpenAI’s revenues would have doubled in a year and would have exceeded 3 billion dollars on an annual basis, but the company would have found itself in a deficit of 5 billion, due in particular to the 4 billion dollars of computer calculations paid to its partner Microsoft . The company expects revenue of $11 billion in 2025, according to the Financial times. And ChatGPT would now have 250 million weekly users, OpenAI wrote on Wednesday 2 October to reassure.
Debate on the non-profit structure
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