IBL News | New York
OpenAI, which has 1,700 employees, is making substantial changes to its management team and corporate structure to attract large investors in a deal that would value it at $100 billion.
However, it has not yet settled on a new structure.
According to an elaborate report from The New York Times, the transition has been difficult, and early employees continue to leave.
“Rapid growth hasn’t resolved a fundamental question of what OpenAI is supposed to be: Is it a cutting-edge A.I. lab created for the benefit of humanity, or an aspiring industry giant dedicated to profits?” wrote the paper.
Only three remain of the 13 people who helped found OpenAI in late 2015 with a mission to create artificial general intelligence (A.G.I). One, Greg Brockman, the company’s president, has taken a leave of absence through the end of the year, citing the need for time off after nearly a decade of work.
According to a person familiar with OpenAI’s income, its annual revenues have topped $2 billion. ChatGPT has more than 200 million weekly users—twice the number from nine months ago—and more than 1 million paid users for the corporate versions of ChatGPT.
San Francisco-based research lab said Thursday that the figure includes the total number of people signed up to use its ChatGPT Team and Enterprise services, which are aimed at companies and universities using its ChatGPT Edu product.
The company said just under half of OpenAI’s corporate users are based in the US. Outside the US, the company’s chatbot is most popular with business users in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
However, it is unclear how much the company spends yearly, though one source puts the figure at $7 billion. Microsoft, already OpenAI’s largest investor, earmarked $13 billion for the AI company.
As some employees departed, they were asked to sign legal papers that said they would lose their OpenAI shares if they spoke out against the company. This incited new concerns among the staff, even after the company revoked the practice.
