Musk leads group in bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion - UPI.com
Investors led by Elon Musk have offered $97.4 billion to take over OpenAI, the artificial intelligence maker of ChatGPT that uses artificial intelligence to understand and generate human-like text.
Marc Toberoff, who is Musk's attorney, said he submitted the bid for "all assets" of the tech company to the company's board Monday. The private equity firms include Baron Capital Group, Valor Management, Altreides Management, Vy Fund III, Emanuel Capital Management, and Eight Partners VC. His statement came after a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Response from OpenAI CEO
In response, Open AI chief executive Sam Altman posted on Musk's social media platform X: "No thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want." Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022 and renamed the social media platform X.
OpenAI Bid and Company Background
The OpenAI bid is much lower than the $157 billion the company was valued at in its latest funding round in October last year. Toberoff said the consortium would be "prepared to consider matching or exceeding higher bid." In 2015, Musk and Altman co-founded the startup OpenAI as a nonprofit company, but the relationship has chilled since Musk departed the firm in 2018. The ChatGPT tool debuted in November 2022.
OpenAI is transitioning to a for-profit company, which is required to secure the money needed for further development of artificial intelligence. The company created overseers to review any product the company created, and its products' code was made public. "It's time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens," Musk said in a statement.
Artificial Intelligence Development
Musk founded his artificial intelligence company X.AI in March 2023. Musk has a net worth of more than $400 billion and runs the high-tech companies Tesla and SpaceX. ChatGPT uses machine learning algorithms to process requests and generate responses with human feedback to improve responses. Major tech companies that rely on ChatGP include Apple, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Apple in October debuted its Apple Intelligence tool.
OpenAI is teaming up with U.S. tech giant Oracle, a Japanese investment firm, and an Emirati sovereign wealth fund with plans to build a $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States. President Donald Trump announced the new company, The Stargate Project, after taking office. Musk, who runs Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed the venture does not "actually have the money" it has pledged to investors.
