World's Most Valuable Startup! OpenAI Valued at $500 Billion

On October 2, according to foreign media reports citing informed sources, AI giant OpenAI has completed a share transfer transaction of approximately $66 billion, valuing the company at $500 billion (approximately RMB 3.56 trillion).

There were previously reports that OpenAI had increased its share sale scale by over $40 billion to about $103 billion. According to insiders, the final scale of shares sold in this transaction was less than the initially planned amount of over $100 billion, indicating employee confidence in the company's long-term development.

On October 1 local time, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and joined by former OpenAI Vice President of Safety Research and Peking University's Weng Li, launched its first product, Tinker. It is a flexible API that enables researchers and developers to autonomously control algorithms and data for fine-tuning language models. Switching from a small model to a large model can be achieved by changing just one string in the Python code.

Currently, approximately 700 million people use ChatGPT weekly. Benefiting from ChatGPT's strong growth, OpenAI expects ChatGPT to generate about $10 billion in revenue this year, with total revenue projected to reach $13 billion. According to earlier foreign media reports, OpenAI disclosed its H1 revenue reached $4.3 billion, a 16% increase compared to full-year 2023 revenue, with monthly revenue exceeding $1 billion.

OpenAI also recently announced it had signed a letter of intent and formed a strategic partnership with NVIDIA. OpenAI will be able to use NVIDIA systems (implying millions of GPUs) to build and deploy at least 10GW (gigawatts) of AI data centers for training and running next-generation models. NVIDIA also plans to gradually invest $100 billion in OpenAI.