OpenAI's Altman seeks more funding from Microsoft for AGI

Our 'one single product' is 'intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky'

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has said he hopes Microsoft will keep investing in the company as it works to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a $10 billion multiyear investment in OpenAI, adding to a previous $3 billion investment and, giving it a 49% in the company which was then valued at around $29 billion. Altman told the FT he hopes the Microsoft will continue funding his company, saying "There's a long way to go, and a lot of compute to build out between here and AGI... training expenses are just huge."

Recent reports suggest that OpenAI is in talks to complete a deal with other funders that would value the company at $80 billion.

However, despite growth in revenues OpenAI remains unprofitable, in part due to high model training costs.

As well as the high cost of compute, intense competition in AI has led to a shortage of supply of AI capable hardware, particularly Nvidia's H100 compute accelerators for AI and HPC applications, which retail at $40,000 each. But with competing chips from other vendors beginning to come online, Altman told the FT he thought the logjam is starting to shift.

OpenAI was first to market with a user-friendly chat interface to its GPT 3.5 LLM. However, has Altman has repeatedly stated that his ambition is to create AGI, seeing LLMs as just a stepping stone on that journey.

"Those are channels into our one single product, which is intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky. I think that's what we're about," he said.

While acknowledging safety concerns, Altman said he was optimistic about the potential benefits of AGI, once it can be made safe, although he did not go into how he proposed going about that in the interview.

Microsoft has built GPT-4 into Bing and services and products for enterprises and developers, and Altman spoke of his hope "that we both make money on each other's success, and everybody is happy".

Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Altman on stage at an event where OpenAI unveiled new features, including the latest version of ChatGPT, the GPT-4 Turbo model, which uses training data up to April 2023 and supports image generation through DALL-E 3.

Other new announcements included GPT Store, a platform to allow users to share and market their self-developed GPT bots, Custom GPT for no-code development, and the Assistants API.