OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, now valued at $80 billion

OpenAI’s value is soaring. The Californian start-up has reached an agreement with investors that values ​​the company at least $80 billion (€74 billion), according to the New York Times, after a flamboyant but eventful year for the inventor by ChatGPT. The confidential operation, not confirmed by OpenAI, means that the value of this leading company in artificial intelligence (AI) has almost tripled in less than ten months, according to the American daily's sources.

The deal calls for the San Francisco-based company to sell existing shares to investors, led by Thrive Capital, according to the report published Friday. It allows managers and employees to sell shares at a very favorable price, three months after a major crisis for OpenAI, when its co-founder and boss Sam Altman was fired and then reinstated in the space of a few days.

OpenAI put its generative artificial intelligence software ChatGPT online at the end of 2022. The success of this interface has sparked unprecedented enthusiasm for this cutting-edge technology, capable of producing texts, sounds and images upon simple request in everyday language. Already an investor in the start-up, Microsoft has worked hard. The IT giant has injected around $13 billion into OpenAI in recent years.

It competes fiercely with Google in the development and deployment of generative AI tools, to the point that the American competition authority announced in January the launch of an investigation into the Dantesque investments of Microsoft, Google and Amazon in specialized start-ups.

Founded in 2015 as a non-profit, OpenAI went through a major crisis last November. Its board of directors thanked CEO Sam Altman, a charismatic Silicon Valley figure, accusing him of not having been “transparent.” In the following days, Microsoft offered to hire him, while most of OpenAI's executives and employees demanded the resignation of directors and the return of the boss, threatening to leave the company otherwise. In less than a week, Sam Altman was back in charge.

On Friday, the publisher of ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E unveiled a new tool, called “Sora”, capable of creating realistic videos on request that can last up to a minute. According to the New York Times, OpenAI had already reached a similar agreement early last year with venture capital firms, including Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which increased its value to $29 billion.