OpenAI in deal valuing it at $80 billion: media

OpenAI has concluded a deal with investors that reportedly values the California start-up at $80 billion or more, after a roller-coaster year for the inventor of ChatGPT.

The agreement, reported by The New York Times but not yet confirmed by OpenAI, would mean the value of the company - a world leader in generative artificial intelligence - would have nearly tripled in under 10 months.

The reported deal would have the San Francisco-based firm selling existing shares to investors led by Thrive Capital.

It would permit executives and employees to sell shares at a highly favorable price, just three months after the firm survived a major crisis when company co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman was fired and then brought back only days later.

Microsoft, already an investor in the start-up, redoubled its involvement. The software giant has injected some $13 billion into OpenAI in the past few years.

It is locked in fierce competition with Google to develop and roll out new tools using AI's generative abilities, to the point that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in January launched an investigation into the enormous investments by Microsoft, Google and Amazon in the specialized start-ups.

On Feb. 16, OpenAI - developer not only of ChatGPT but of image-generating DALL-E - released a new tool named "Sora," which can create realistic videos of up to a minute on simple demand.

According to the Times, OpenAI concluded a similar agreement early last year with venture-capital firms including Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the firm at $29 billion.