The creator company of Chatgpt, Openaiannounced Monday that it caught 40,000 million dollars in a new investment round that raised its value to 300,000 million, the largest capital collection ever made by a start-up.
The Japanese investor Softbank will be the main participant in the injection of resources to that American firm considered the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI).
Its new assessment places Openai among the largest companies in the world that do not quote on the stock market, next to the Aerospace Spacex firm of Elon Musk (350,000 million) and the Chinese company Bytedance (more than 400,000 million), Tiktok matrix.
The operation “allows us to further expand the borders of the AI investigation,” said on its OpenAi website, based in San Francisco.
The Softbank shareholder will contribute 30,000 million dollars and other investors the rest, a source close to the matter told AFP.
According to several means, an immediate disbursement of 10,000 million dollars is expected and the balance will be distributed throughout the year.
“Your support will help us to continue building AI systems that promote scientific discovery, allow personalized education, improve human creativity and allane the way” towards a general AI, that which achieves a human level intelligence, the company added.
Openia also plans with these resources “to offer increasingly powerful tools to the 500 million people who use chatgpt every week”, after counting them just over a month ago at 400 million.
Change of statutes?
According to the US press, about 10,000 million dollars of the total announced will only be disbursed on condition that OpenAI modifies its statutes of non -profit society to conventional corporation.
This change of legal structure is a point of friction among some of the co -founders of OpenAi, including the Museum, and current investors, who want to make their investment profitable.
The detractors of the change fear that Openai puts more emphasis on the benefits than in the reliability and safety of their programs.
Musk has led the emerging company to the courts to prevent it, arguing that it would divert it from its original mission.
In an attempt to recover control, the billionaire presented an offer of 97.4 billion dollars to repurchase its assets, but received the rejection of the Board of Directors.
Openia needs funds urgently, since it invests billions of dollars in chips, servers and data centers that allow you to develop your generative AI programs.
Although it provides to triple its sales from here to 2025 to 12.7 billion dollars, it does not expect to reach profitability before 2029, according to internal documents cited by US media.
Commercial blow
The news of the historic financing came the same day that Openai announced that he builds a model of open source generative, since he faces the hard competition of his Chinese opponent Deepseek and Meta, the owner of Facebook.
The measure marks a strategic turn of the company, which until now has been a strong defender of closed models that do not allow developers to modify basic technology to make AI better adapt to its objectives.
The San Francisco -based group gave another commercial coup last week with the deployment of new image generation capabilities in their Chatgpt conversational robot.
Internet users discovered that the assistant is able to produce drawings with the recognizable style of Studio Ghibli, creator of great success animation films such as “Chihiro’s trip”, “My neighbor Totoro” or “Princess Mononoke”.
The novelty was viralized and further fired the popularity of the application, to the point that Openai had to restrict these functions to its payment packages until further notice.