OpenAI may soon be valued at $100bn after funding talks

Earlier this month, co-founder John Schulman announced his departure from the AI start-up to join rival Anthropic.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI is in talks to raise a fresh round of funding that it expected to value the AI start-up at more than $100bn.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the funding round will be led by New York-based venture capital firm Thrive Capital. People familiar with the matter told the outlet that the firm will invest around $1bn in OpenAI.

The company’s latest valuation was $86bn and counts among its backers Microsoft, Khosla Ventures, Infosys and Silicon Valley VC heavyweight Y Combinator. Microsoft is also reportedly backed the latest round first revealed yesterday (28 August).

Microsoft has been the biggest backer of OpenAI since ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2022. Last year, the company committed billions in investment to the AI start-up and integrated many of its tools with OpenAI models, including Bing and Copilot.

Last month, Microsoft decided to give up its observer seat on the board of OpenAI saying it has seen “significant progress” in the AI start-up and no longer feels it is necessary to hold one. This is in the context of ongoing antitrust scrutiny of its ties with OpenAI in the US.

Established in 2015 by a star-studded founding team that includes CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, OpenAI kicked off the global race to build advanced generative AI models when it released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022.

Since then, the start-up has grown exponentially and announced a spate of AI products. But it has also seen an exodus of sorts from its leadership in recent months.

Earlier this month, co-founder John Schulman announced his departure from the AI start-up to join rival Anthropic. In a note to colleagues, the research scientist said he wanted to focus on AI alignment – the study of how to build safe AI systems and ensure they do what they’re supposed to do – and start a new chapter of his career with more technical work.

In May, former OpenAI executive Jan Leike also left the company to join Anthropic. Leike was one of the leaders of OpenAI’s superalignment team, which was dissolved after Leike and former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever resigned from the company earlier that month. Leike spoke out against the company shortly after resigning, claiming he disagreed with OpenAI’s leadership about the company’s core priorities “for some time” and that these issues had reached a “breaking point”.

Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder of OpenAI, left the company in February to work on personal projects. Last month, he revealed a new company called Eureka Labs that will enable students to study a wide variety of subjects through its AI platform.

Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.