Grappling with the science of artificial intelligence isn’t for the weak of heart. The same is true of investing in OpenAI, the purveyor of productivity-enhancing chatbots.
A $6.6bn injection of investor funds, which OpenAI announced on Wednesday, gives Sam Altman’s nine-year-old company a post-money valuation of $157bn. It adds Japan’s SoftBank to a list of investors that already included Microsoft, Jared Kushner’s Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures. For a company whose founder envisages “shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable”, the price might seem cheap. To say the reality is more complex would be an enormous understatement.
Altman’s investors will have had to get comfortable with at least four levels of intricacy. There are the products themselves, of course, so advanced they can answer PhD-level questions on physics. More head-scratching is OpenAI’s governance. Altman was ousted last year, then swiftly returned. Multiple executives have since donned their virtual parachutes. Supreme power theoretically vests in a board meant to ensure OpenAI benefits humanity; Altman’s hokey-cokey showed its toothlessness.