Startup News: OpenAI’s value to top $100B while rivals xAI and Anthropic get product upgrades
Over the past two years, OpenAI, the creator of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, has emerged as one of the most valuable of the generative artificial intelligence startups. And OpenAI’s valuation is expected to climb even higher as a result of a new funding round.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI is planning a new financing round that would value the startup, which was valued at $86 billion late last year, at over $100 billion.
According to an article in The Journal in late August, venture capital firm Thrive Capital is leading the latest funding round, with plans to invest about $1 billion in Open AI. Microsoft, which owns almost half of OpenAI’s shares, is also expected to increase its investment as part of this latest funding round.
This new round – the largest infusion of capital into OpenAI since Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in early 2023 – comes as OpenAI’s widely-reported plans to lead a global buildout of AI infrastructure comes into sharper focus.
OpenAI’s ambition to be a leader in generative AI doesn’t stop with the new funding. According to a Bloomberg article last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is heading up a plan that targets projects in several U.S. states, according to a source familiar with the effort. The projects would include the construction of data centers, an increase of energy capacity with additional turbines and generators, and the expansion of chip manufacturing, Bloomberg reported.
Financial backers, according to Bloomberg, are expected to include investors in Canada, South Korea, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates.
OpenAI’s Forge Price™ is $190 as of September 5, 2024, implying a valuation of $110.8 billion and a 37% premium to its last funding round.
xAI Makes an Update to its Colossus Product
Meanwhile, xAI, a generative AI company that Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk launched last year to compete against OpenAI, has completed the assembly of an upgraded AI training system named Colossus that features 100,000 graphics cards.
Musk announced the achievement on X, the popular microblogging platform, he owns, proclaiming that “Colossus is the most powerful AI training system in the world.” In May 2024, according to tech startup news site SiliconAngle, xAI raised $6 billion in a fresh funding round, effectively valuing the company at the time at $24 billion.
xAI’s Forge Price™ is $11.97 as of September 5, 2024, implying a valuation of $24 billion.
Anthropic Announces New Updates to its Chatbot Claude
Finally, Anthropic, another leading generative AI company, has announced some developments to its chatbot rival to ChatGPT known as Claude. According to tech startup news site VentureBeat, ‘Anthropic recently released the system prompts — the instructions for a model to follow — for its Claude family of models, but it was incomplete.” But the company, according to VentureBeat, now plans to release the system prompts for its latest feature, Artifacts, which had previously not been released.
Anthropic’s Forge Price™ is $30 as of September 5, 2024, implying a valuation of $18.4 billion.
About the Author
John Kimelman is a veteran journalist who has worked at Barron’s and CNBC covering such topics as investing and commercial banking. Mr. Kimelman has received compensation from Forge Global, Inc. for authoring this article. Read more from John.