OpenAI, a San Francisco-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence powered chatbots, has finalized a tender offer allowing some of its employees to cash out their holdings. This move marks the successful conclusion of talks that began last fall for the company to raise billions of dollars from Microsoft.
The profit units, which are essentially rights to future OpenAI profits, have been bought from the eight-year-old firm at a price that implies a roughly $27 billion valuation, according to the people familiar with the discussions. Many of the 400 employees at OpenAI are now being rewarded with generous sums of money from the tender offer, thanks to the tremendous successes of the latest advances in generative AI, a technology that produces human-like writing, images and codes.
OpenAI is known as a research laboratory and software company, founded in 2015 by charismatic and prosperous leaders, including Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Microsoft’s former research lab director Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman. OpenAI is a leading player in advances in the field of artificial intelligence and is driven towards making AIs that can act and think like human beings. It puts a major emphasis on artificial general intelligence and focuses on research related to deep learning, reinforcement learning, and unsupervised learning.
The person with direct knowledge of the situation is Greg Brockman, one of the co-founders at OpenAI. Throughout his professional journey, he has worked variously as the CTO of Stripe and the CEO of the analytics firm AdMetrics and since 2019 he has been the CTO at OpenAI. He is renowned for having led OpenAI through its most successful funding period to date, raising more than $1.4 billion, and he is credited for working with the cutting-edge use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. His work at OpenAI is said to have inspired a new wave of research in the field of artificial intelligence.
