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Sam Altman
, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI: His company's valuation could increase significantly soon
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The ChatGPT software has been showing what artificial intelligence is now capable of since the end of last year.
The chat robot can do homework, write applications or write farewell speeches to colleagues.
In the meantime, there has been real hype about the new program from the software company OpenAI.
More than a million users have registered on the platform in the first five days.
Apparently this is paying off: The San Francisco company could soon become one of the most valuable start-ups in the United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), OpenAI is currently in talks for a stake sale that would significantly increase the company's valuation from $14 billion in 2021 to $29 billion now.
The venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Founders Fund of star investor
Peter Thiel
(55) have expressed an interest in buying shares from existing shareholders, the WSJ reports, citing internal sources.
But who is actually behind the celebrated start-up?
Tesla boss Elon Musk is a co-founder
There are prominent names on the list of OpenAI founders, above all those of Tesla boss
Elon Musk
(51) and tech entrepreneur
Sam Altman
(37), who already helped to develop the unicorn stripe.
When it was founded in 2015, they also acted as co-chairs.
OpenAI was initially conceived as a non-profit research institute.
The aim was to research artificial intelligence and to share findings and possible patents with the public.
In the for-profit tech scene, this attracted attention at the time.
The organization's mission was "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity".
OpenAI was initially financed by donations, among others entrepreneur
Jessica Livingston
(51), investor Peter Thiel, as well as Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research were among the early donors.
In total, OpenAI had a total of around one billion dollars in 2015. "We believe that we will only spend a small fraction of that in the next few years," the company's website said at the time.
Three years after its founding, OpenAI then announced Elon Musk's resignation from the board.
The reason: The entrepreneur wanted to avoid a conflict of interest because Tesla wanted to focus on the further development of autonomous driving using artificial intelligence.
In 2019, the move away from the purely non-profit model finally came: the company was restructured and the subsidiary OpenAI LP was founded.
This follows a so-called "capped profit" model: the profits for investors and employees are limited, excess income goes to the parent company OpenAI, which remains non-profit.
Among other things, only a minority of the board members may hold shares in the company.
Microsoft invests one billion euros
The decision not to stick to the non-profit structure was no coincidence: the software giant Microsoft invested around one billion euros in the company shortly before the restructuring, making it one of the most important supporters of OpenAI.
In return, Microsoft's cloud platform Azure became the sole provider of the start-up.
There is now speculation in the industry as to whether Microsoft wants to strengthen its Bing search engine with OpenAI technology.
With the – still – largest search engine in the world, Google, a “Code Red” is said to have been triggered because of ChatGPT.
But the chat robot is not the start-up's only promising product.
Among other things, OpenAI also developed Musenet, a service that can generate four-minute songs, and the Dall-E software, which creates images from words.
Investors and users apparently believe in the success of OpenAI's AI products.
However, whether the hype is justified remains to be seen.