OpenAI and Microsoft are locked in some intense negotiations that could decide the future of one of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies, reports the Financial Times.
ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, valued at $260 billion US, wants to restructure so it can eventually go public, while Microsoft, which has already invested over $13 billion, wants long-term access to OpenAI’s future AI technology.
One person close to OpenAI said the talks are serious but calm: “It’s not like it’s all gone to hell and it’s open warfare. There’s a tough negotiation but we’re confident we’ll get it done.”
But Microsoft insiders don’t like OpenAI’s style apparently. A senior Microsoft employee told the FT, “OpenAI says to Microsoft, ‘give us money and compute and stay out of the way.’ To be honest, that is a bad partner attitude, it shows arrogance.”
OpenAI says it can’t raise massive sums like the $40 billion it got in March under its original non-profit structure. “Raising $40bn under a capped profit structure is not achievable,” a person close to OpenAI explained.
Elon Musk, who helped start OpenAI but left after a falling-out, is suing to stop the restructuring. Musk has his own AI company xAI (which recently acquired X). His lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said: “The charity is turning over its assets and technology to private persons for private gain — including Sam Altman — while moving all of the charity’s actual work on AI into a giant for-profit corporation.”
Former OpenAI employee Page Hedley also criticized the move, warning it shifts power from the public to investors. “It creates the potential for extraordinary wealth and power from AI to be reallocated from the public to OpenAI’s investors.”
Experts say if OpenAI fails to finalize the deal with Microsoft and other backers, it could face serious trouble raising money in the future and competing with tech giants like Google, which has its own AI chatbot known as Gemini.
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