OpenAI Doubles 2022 Losses to $540 Million Due to Rising Development Costs
OpenAI, the AI research company that created ChatGPT and Dall-E 2, has reportedly doubled its losses to $540 million in 2022. This increase in losses is attributed to the soaring development expenses for its chatbot. As a result, the company is looking to raise as much as $100 billion in the coming years to fund its goal of developing an artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is an AI advanced enough to improve its own capabilities.
According to The Information, OpenAI's losses have also been impacted by the high costs of employment. The company has had to lure skilled staff like engineers and research experts from Google, and the cost of training machine-learning models and acquiring fresh data sets is also expected to escalate. This is due to more customers using AI technology, and the company needing to train future versions of the software.
While OpenAI's revenue has picked up, reaching an annual pace of hundreds of millions of dollars weeks after the launch of a paid version in February, costs are likely to continue to rise. As the AI arms race intensifies, data costs are also expected to skyrocket as platforms like Reddit and StackOverflow introduce policies that charge AI firms access to their previously free data sets.
CEO Sam Altman has suggested that OpenAI may try to raise $100 billion to achieve its goal of developing AGI. However, acquiring fresh data sets for its software is a point of contention, as companies like Samsung are wary of their proprietary data slipping into the ChatGPT data pool.
Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, tried to take over as CEO in 2018 but walked away after pushback from Altman and others. Musk has expressed concerns that OpenAI's profit incentives could interfere with the ethics of AI models.
In conclusion, OpenAI has doubled its losses to $540 million in 2022 due to rising development costs. The company is looking to raise $100 billion to fund its goal of developing AGI, although acquiring fresh data sets to train its software is a point of contention among some companies and experts. With the AI arms race intensifying and data costs expected to rise, the future of OpenAI and its developments remains uncertain.
