OpenAI just raised $6.6 billion to build ever-larger AI models

According to a blog post from the company, OpenAI just closed a historic funding round, making a $6.6 billion investment at a $157 billion valuation to continue its mission of building artificial general intelligence.

The funding round was led by Thrive Capital, which said it committed $1 billion Financial Times. It was also reported that Thrive received a special offer (not offered to other investors) that would allow it to invest an additional $1 billion at the same value next year if the AI ​​company hits a revenue target. Reuters reported.

These funds appear to be contingent on OpenAI reportedly restructuring into a for-profit company. The for-profit wing of the company is currently overseen by a nonprofit research organization and investors' profits are capped at 100x. If OpenAI does not restructure as a for-profit company within two years, Axios As reported, investors can demand their money back. Last week, Reuters reported that the company is considering becoming a nonprofit corporation (like Anthropic).

In a rare move, OpenAI also urged investors to avoid backing rival startups such as Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI Financial Times reported. It's worth noting that OpenAI's latest funding round only narrowly surpasses that of xAI, which raised $6 billion in May.

This funding round values ​​OpenAI at approximately 40 times its reported revenue, an unprecedented figure that shows how much hype there is around AI in Silicon Valley. The New York Times reported that OpenAI's monthly revenue reached $300 million in August and the company expects annual revenue of about $3.7 billion this year (and estimates its revenue will be $11.6 billion next year). dollars will reach).

These billions are used for the incredibly expensive task of training AI frontier models. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said that AI models that cost $1 billion to train are in development, and $100 billion models are not far behind. For OpenAI, which wants to develop a range of “justification” models, these costs are only expected to explode – so new rounds of funding like this are crucial.