OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has filed confidential paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, paving the way for a potential initial public offering (IPO). This move follows its rival Anthropic’s June 1 disclosure that it is also moving toward an IPO.

Background

OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and is now a company valued at $852 billion. The filing comes at a time when OpenAI appears to be losing its strong early leads with consumers and businesses to Google and Anthropic.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first publicly floated the possibility of an IPO last fall, describing it as the “most likely path” for the company given its size and the need for vast amounts of capital to advance its technology. The company has been losing more money than it makes due to the huge costs of building out the venture.

Competition and Future Plans

OpenAI faces fierce competition from Anthropic, maker of the increasingly popular chatbot Claude, and Google’s AI assistant Gemini. In an April interview, OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar declined to give a timeline for a potential IPO but said the company was already “acting with the good hygiene of a public company,” such as by measuring its revenue in the way a publicly traded firm would have to report earnings to the SEC.

Altman outlined a broad vision for OpenAI, including three big goals: building an automated AI researcher, accelerating economic growth, and giving “everyone on Earth a personal AGI,” which stands for artificial general intelligence or a form of AI that surpasses humans at many tasks.

Original reporting: WTVQ (Lexington) — read the source article.