OpenAI Could Triple Valuation to $86 Billion With Tender Offer
OpenAI is seeking to sell employee shares to investors at a valuation of $86 billion. The company was valued at $29 billion in April when it raised money from Microsoft and Thrive Capital.
The tender offers employees the option of selling a billion dollars worth of OpenAI shares for a specific price at a certain point in the future. It is unclear who the buyers will be, although they could include existing OpenAI backers Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.
OpenAI Tender Offer Could Help Expansion
The tender offer will allow shareholders to profit from the company’s increase in valuation and help OpenAI boost its competitive edge. Since launching ChatGPT in November 2022, OpenAI has added several features to its flagship product.
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Rivals Anthropic, Inflection AI, Google, and others have, in the meantime, accelerated their own developments, focusing on specific areas. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, is developing a language model that obeys principles enshrined in an AI Constitution.
Artificial intelligence (AI) advancements need significant computing power to progress, a need OpenAI shares with its rivals. Income from its stock sale would allow it, like its rivals, to commission more computing resources.
AI Firms Receive Billions to Progress
Amazon Web Services recently agreed to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, adding to the $300 million Google invested last year. The partnership will likely see Anthropic use Amazon’s proprietary technology to run its AI workloads.
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OpenAI already runs its large language workloads using Microsoft’s data centers. Bard, Google’s AI, uses the Google Cloud Platform.
Inflection, led by DeepMind’s Mustafa Suleyman, raised $1.5 billion from Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Nvidia in June. The company has built what it claims is one of the largest AI training clusters to develop a personal AI assistant.
AI Investments | Source: Statista
Other firms, Cohere, Adept, Runway, Character.ai, and Stability AI, smaller with respect to valuations, have raised $445 million, $415 million, $237 million, and $150 million from investors.