According to overnight news, following Microsoft's participation in the new round of financing for OpenAI, Apple and Nvidia are also participating in the new financing of OpenAI. Now the top 3 companies in the global market value are competing for OpenAI. Altman said that this is the strongest financier in the history of the technology industry.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in a new round of financing led by Thrive Capital, the valuation of OpenAI will exceed 100 billion US dollars.

With the rapid development of AI, the valuation of OpenAI has also risen rapidly, which is 16% higher than the valuation of 86 billion US dollars in the employee stock sale earlier this year.

Stunning trillion-dollar valuation and competition among the three giants.

Since the end of 2023, OpenAI's annualized revenue has doubled to 3.4 billion US dollars; the weekly active user base of ChatGPT has exceeded 0.2 billion, which is twice as much as a year ago.

OpenAI's next-generation models are also about to be released, and the mysterious 'Strawberry' and 'Orion' models of OpenAI have 'leaked'. 'Strawberry' has a powerful inference capability and can handle complex mathematical problems; 'Orion' is the next-generation large model surpassing GPT-4, trained using the high-quality data from 'Strawberry' to reduce illusions or errors produced by the model.

The company is likely to use these indicators to attract investors. Currently, it is reported that Microsoft, Apple, and Nvidia, the top three global companies, are all competing to invest in OpenAI, which shows the high expectations of the market for its technological potential.

Despite Sam Altman's excellent capital raising ability, some investors remain cautious in the face of such a high valuation. There are rumors that OpenAI's valuation may even reach 125 billion US dollars.

It is worth mentioning that even a valuation exceeding 100 billion US dollars is enough to be shocking. Among private venture companies, only a few such as ByteDance and SpaceX have valuations higher than OpenAI.

OpenAI still faces uncertainty.

However, the internal leadership changes and the uncertainty of future business models also present a challenge to this valuation.

Last year, OpenAI experienced the dismissal and rehiring of Sam Altman, as well as the departure of several co-founders, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and key leader John Schulman. In addition, the co-founder and president Greg Brockman is currently on leave.

In addition to internal changes, OpenAI also faces the question of when to transition from a non-profit organization to a for-profit enterprise.

Sam Altman once referred to OpenAI as the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley's history, and has raised funds from a series of well-known investors in Silicon Valley. According to The Information's analysis of its chatbot operation costs, OpenAI's losses this year may reach up to 5 billion US dollars, not including the cost of training future large language models and paying its 1,500 employees. It is unlikely that this will be OpenAI's last private financing.

For Thrive Capital, it is undoubtedly a highly risky investment. Few companies are able to surpass a billion-dollar valuation, and these price tags are more common in the public market, where shareholders, rather than major fundraisers like Altman, determine the value of the stocks.

Although the security of this concentrated risk investment method may be questionable, there is no doubt that Thrive Capital has enough capital to continue supporting OpenAI. Earlier this month, the company raised $5 billion for its two new funds from its partners, making it the largest fundraising effort to date.