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- OpenAI has been valued at $80 billion or more following a new deal, The New York Times reported.
- The AI company's valuation has tripled in under 10 months, the report says.
- The deal allows staff to cash out their shares in the company, per the report.
The artificial intelligence (AI) firm OpenAI has completed a deal that valued the business at $80 billion or more, The New York Times reported on Friday, citing three unnamed people with knowledge of the deal.
The San Francisco-based company would sell shares in a tender offer — a "public bid for stockholders to sell their stock" — led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital, the report said.
The deal allows OpenAI employees to cash out their shares in the company, the report added.
The company was involved in another tender offer deal just last year, with venture capital firms Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and K2 Global agreeing to buy shares in a deal that valued OpenAI at about $29 billion — meaning it has roughly tripled its valuation, per the report.
OpenAI has been at the heart of the AI boom since the release of its ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 thrust it into the limelight.
The firm, which Sam Altman leads, saw its revenues soar to more than $1.6 billion in 2023 due to an explosion of interest in the tech.
It has also received huge backing from tech giant Microsoft, including $10 billion last January.
OpenAI recently unveiled its latest AI tool, "Sora," allowing users to create videos based on text.
"Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user's prompt," the company says on its website.
Previews of the product, which is now set to be tested by red teamers "to assess critical areas for harms or risks," show highly realistic footage of an art gallery tour and a woman walking along a rainy Tokyo street.
"We're sharing our research progress early to start working with and getting feedback from people outside OpenAI and to give the public a sense of what AI capabilities are on the horizon," the company added.