The company that runs ChatGPT, OpenAI, is reportedly in talks with Microsoft Corp. to invest $10 billion in it. This would value the San Francisco-based business at $29 billion.
According to the publication, deal paperwork was recently distributed to prospective investors with the goal of closing the round by the end of 2022. The money also comes from other venture businesses.
Microsoft declined to react when asked by Reuters for a remark; OpenAI did not.
This comes in response to a Wall Street Journal report that said OpenAI was in talks to sell its current stock to venture capital companies including Thrive Capital and Founders Fund for an estimated $29 billion valuation.
Tesla Inc.’s CEO Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman founded OpenAI, which on November 30 made the ChatGPT chatbot available for free public testing.
A chatbot is a piece of computer code designed to mimic human speech in response to user input.
The funding terms indicated that Microsoft would receive 75% of OpenAI’s earnings up until the time at which OpenAI had recouped its initial investment from ChatGPT and other companies like the picture creation tool Dall-E, according to the Semafor report.
Without providing specific ownership percentages until Microsoft received its money back, the report stated that upon reaching that milestone, Microsoft would own a 49 percent stake in OpenAI, along with another 49 percent from other investors and an additional 2 percent from the nonprofit parent of OpenAI.
The Information revealed this week that Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, was aiming to develop a version of its search engine Bing utilizing the ChatGPT AI.
To read our blog on “Software developer who claimed that Google’s AI chatbot is sentient has been fired,” click here.
