OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) company supported by Microsoft. In less than a year, a sale of OpenAI shares to an investment firm called Thrive Capital has multiplied OpenAI’s value by almost 3 times.
According to reports, Thrive Capital bought OpenAI shares for about $29 billion. This places OpenAI’s new valuation at over $80 billion.
So OpenAI is now the world’s 3rd most valuable private company thanks to this new investment. Only ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, and SpaceX are worth more.
In a very short time, OpenAI’s backing by Microsoft and now further investment has made it rocket up to be one of the top AI unicorns globally based on its over $80 billion valuation. Microsoft’s support continues to be pivotal in OpenAI’s rapid growth.
What does OpenAI do, and why is it so valuable?
OpenAI is a company working on artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of creating a “general AI”. This means building an AI system capable of doing any task a human can, in a way that helps humanity.
Some of OpenAI’s well-known projects are:
- GPT-4: Very advanced AI for generating human-like text
- DALL-E: AI that creates realistic images from text
- Sora: AI that makes videos based on text input
Investors and big tech companies see huge potential in AI like OpenAI’s to transform the world. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI and is a close partner, owning 49% of OpenAI.
OpenAI runs its powerful AI systems using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. However, they have competition from other AI startups like Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google.
The race is on to lead advancements in AI, so OpenAI is raising more money from investors to keep innovating quickly. They may soon be valued at over $100 billion – among the world’s biggest companies. With Microsoft’s backing plus growing outside investment, OpenAI aims to stay at the front of inventing advanced, beneficial AI.