SoftBank invests $500 million in OpenAI
Japanese investment company SoftBank has reportedly decided to invest $500 million in OpenAI , a company specializing in artificial intelligence, according to the technical website “The Information.”
The investment from SoftBank comes as OpenAI seeks to raise $6.5 billion in its latest funding round.
Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the new round of funding values the company at about $150 billion.
This is SoftBank's first investment in OpenAI, while Apple declined to participate in the company's latest funding round, according to press reports.
One challenge to achieving the $150 billion valuation is OpenAI’s ability to remove the cap on earnings for investors; the company started as a nonprofit in 2015, but has been tweaking its business structure in recent years. In 2019, the company added a cap on earnings, which prevented investors from earning more than 100 times their investment.
Further changes are expected soon, as OpenAI restructures its business into a for-profit organization, a move that could make CEO Sam Altman an estimated $10.5 billion richer.
Altman, who co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk and a number of other entrepreneurs, earns an annual salary of $65,000, according to some sources.
Last year, Altman told a U.S. Senate subcommittee overseeing artificial intelligence that he had no stock in the company, adding that he did his job because he loved it.
However, this statement was somewhat misleading: While Altman did not directly own shares in OpenAI, he did own shares in Y Combinator, which had shares in OpenAI, The Guardian reported last month. That stake could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last month, OpenAI announced that the number of users of its most prominent product, ChatGPT, had exceeded 200 million monthly users.