OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is considering selling existing shares at a much higher valuation to investors, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The report said the deal could value OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, at between $80 billion and $90 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
OpenAI has not commented on the report.
ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a large language mode-based chatbot. It was launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022.
It has gained widespread attention in Silicon Valley at a time when investors see generative AI as the next big growth area for tech firms. Early this year, Microsoft Corp invested $10 billion into OpenAI, valuing the San Francisco-based firm at $29 billion.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, among others.
The mission of OpenAI is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. AGI is the highly autonomous system that is capable of outperforming humans at most economically valuable work.
Aside from ChatGPT, OpenAI’s products and projects include, DALL-E, which can generate creative and high-quality images from textual descriptions; Codex, the model behind GitHub Copilot, capable of writing code based on user instructions; OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms; and CLIP, which can understand imaes and text together.