Could OpenAI be the next tech giant?
The creation of a new market is like the start of a long race. Competitors jockey for position as spectators excitedly clamour. Then, like races, markets enter a calmer second phase. The field orders itself into leaders and laggards. The crowds thin.
In the contest to dominate the future of artificial intelligence, OpenAI, a startup backed by Microsoft, established an early lead by launching ChatGPT last November. The app reached 100m users faster than any before it. Rivals scrambled. Google and its corporate parent, Alphabet, rushed the release of a rival chatbot, Bard. So did startups like Anthropic. Venture capitalists poured over $40bn into AI firms in the first half of 2023, nearly a quarter of all venture dollars this year. Then the frenzy died down. Public interest in AI peaked a couple of months ago, according to data from Google searches. Unique monthly visits to ChatGPT’s website have declined from 210m in May to 180m now (see chart).
Maybe not, but with the exception of Mr Musk, who pulled out in 2018 and is now building his own AI model, just about everybody seems to want a piece of OpenAI regardless. Investors appear confident that they can achieve venture-scale returns if the firm keeps growing. In order to remain attractive to investors, the company itself has loosened the profit cap and switched to one based on the annual rate of return (though it will not confirm what the maximum rate is). Academic debates about the meaning of AGI aside, the profit units themselves can be sold on the market just like standard equities. The firm has already offered several opportunities for early employees to sell their units.
2023-09-18 15:45:18
Source from www.economist.com
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