OpenAI has recently secured a record-breaking $6.6 billion (€6 billion) in capital, albeit under remarkable conditions. Concurrently, an increasing number of original founders appear to be departing from the AI developer.
OpenAI has recently clinched another capital investment of approximately $6.6 billion, marking the largest venture capital investment in history. This influx of funds has propelled the AI specialist’s enterprise value to an unprecedented $157 billion.
The investment round was led by Thrive Capital, contributing a substantial $1.6 billion, largely from its own resources. Other participants in the investment round included Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, Tiger Global and MGX. Reports suggest that SoftBank and Khosla each invested $500 million. As previously speculated , Apple did not participate in the capital round.
The AI giant says it intends to use the venture capital raised to invest even more in its groundbreaking AI research, ramping up computing power and develop AI tools that can solve complex cases.
Remarkable investment terms
Experts posit that this new round of investment may be linked to a restructuring of the AI company’s organizational framework. Currently, OpenAI operates as a non-profit organization with a commercial arm dedicated to product development activities. In the proposed new structure, the AI giant plans to incorporate this branch as a “benefit corporation” – an entity that generates profits for social causes. Additionally, it aims to eliminate existing dividend restrictions for investors.
According to Axios, if this organizational transformation does not materialize within the next two years, investors could potentially request a refund of their investments from the final round. More unusual investment terms are said to be circulating. Among these, OpenAI is said to be requesting that investors refrain from simultaneously investing in competitors, such as Anthropic. This AI specialist itself is reportedly seeking additional investment capital. With this capital, Anthropic would like to achieve a market value of $40 billion.
Departure of many original founders
Despite the continued influx of capital investments, there appears to be ongoing turbulence in terms of personnel. Since its inception in 2015, OpenAI has seen the departure of nine out of its original 11 founders. The exodus began in 2016, with three more original founders leaving in recent months. Of the initial founding team, only CEO Sam Altman and Polish AI specialist Wojciech Zaremba remain at OpenAI.
John Schulman, the lead developer behind ChatGPT, has moved to Anthropic. Co-founder Greg Brockman announced a sabbatical for the remainder of the year, while Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever left in May to establish his own start-up, Super Intelligence. Furthermore, long-standing employees CTO Mira Murati and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew have recently departed.
Also read: OpenAI layoffs: CTO and chief research officer leave
Dutch founder to Anthropic
In 2018, Dutch OpenAI founder Diederik (Durk) Kingma left for Google. In this role, he led the research for LLMs and image models for Google Brain. Google Brain was merged with Deepmind late last year.
Recently, Kingma announced he was moving from Google to Anthropic. He cited alignment with Anthropic’s vision for AI development as the primary reason for this move, particularly their commitment to developing powerful AI systems in a responsible manner.
Tip! Ilya Sutskever wants to do what OpenAI can’t: to develop superintelligence securely