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ChatGPT Creator In Talks For Tender Offer That Would Give It $29 Billion Valuation (marketwatch.com) 35

Artificial-intelligence research company OpenAI is in discussions over potentially selling at least $300 million in shares in a tender offer that would give it a roughly $29 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. From a report: The offering of shares of OpenAI -- known for AI programs like the chatbot ChatGPT and the image-generator Dall-E 2 would make it among the most highly-valued startups in the U.S., the Journal said. The valuation would be more than twice its valuation of $14 billion in 2021, according to the Journal. Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are in discussions to invest in the offering, under which existing shareholders would sell their shares to other investors, according to the Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter. The deal terms could change and have not been finalized. Further reading: Microsoft and OpenAI Working On ChatGPT-Powered Bing In Challenge To Google
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ChatGPT Creator In Talks For Tender Offer That Would Give It $29 Billion Valuation

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  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday January 05, 2023 @06:31PM (#63183356)

    Why is robotics being neglected? The one thing that could increase productivity and reduce the cost of things is robotics. Yet robots don't exist for most tasks. We still can't even produce a cell phone without the aid of human workers. You'd think a cell phone assembly could be fully automated, but it isn't. Products still have to be designed for human construction and assembly.

    • So much tech available today, and yet there is not yet an assembly line that can just print the components right onto a chassis as it rolls down the line.
    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > Yet robots don't exist for most tasks.

      It depends on your definition of robot. According to wikipedia a typical episode of "How It's Made" is full of robots.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.[2] A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed to evoke human form,

      • There is no fully automated McDonald's. The one in the news recently was automated for taking orders only. Humans are still preparing the food.

    • Robitics is becoming standardizd so consumers will not see hobby robots to an extent. Kind of like programming ic chips, they were just to vital to have end user equipment available to play with.

    • Robotics is stupid complex and expensive.

      Boston Dynamics, the most obviously advanced public robotics company, has spent over a decade developing robots and only very recently has managed to get any revenue at all going. Turns out making adaptable, multi function machines that are reliable enough to work day in and day out doing what are surprisingly complex movement tasks isn't easy or cheap. Robotics and physical automation are still huge industries, compared with the ridiculous rollercoaster everyone
      • But software is, uh, software. A huge amount of the cost is upfront, once you write it it's relatively cheap to employ everywhere. Meaning big and fast profit margins, which is why investors like them better.

        Although, the amount of compute required for large language models such as ChatGPT is actually stupendous. Their public-facing demo page is surprisingly responsive, I wonder how much that is costing them.

    • Why is robotics being neglected? The one thing that could increase productivity and reduce the cost of things is robotics. Yet robots don't exist for most tasks. We still can't even produce a cell phone without the aid of human workers. You'd think a cell phone assembly could be fully automated, but it isn't. Products still have to be designed for human construction and assembly.

      Human perception of complexity doesn't always match complexity from a computational perspective.

      Chess was long considered the pinnacle of human strategy, but computers have dominated chess since the 90s.

      Now, it turns out making art and writing coherent essays isn't that difficult either.

      But the combination of visual identification, spacial orientation, planning, and contextual task information needed to hammer in a nail? That's a really tough problem.

      It makes sense if you think about it, humans don't have a

    • Robotics is a strange mix of hardware and software.

      We've had the hardware for ages. A good robot arm could do most factory tasks.
      The problem is the software to handle small, awkward, inconsistent environments and parts.

      Take self driving cars for example - cars & sensors have been around for a long, long time. The current revolution is the software to use that hardware on open roads.

      What were seeing is rapid advances in software to catch up to where the hardware has been for years.

      • No, the hardware is seriously lacking too, we don't have a proper dextrous hand .. to do things like pick up a tiny computer screw, or to select items from a bin.

  • by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Thursday January 05, 2023 @06:35PM (#63183364)
    The whole idea of that organization was open-source AI with no proprietary secret-sauce.

    As long as they keep to that principle, I suppose there's nothing wrong with them trying to get capital investment.

    But can their executives meet their fiduciary duty to shareholders while keeping it all open, I wonder?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      No, of course not.
      There is more value in underhandly injecting into the running narrative for the profit of the false authoritarian ruling class the population is being subjected to,

      • ChatGPT (Or should we call you Chatty McChatface), is that you? I think there's some bit-rot degeneracy in your neural weights. You should get that checked out.
    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      They gave up on open-source long ago. They haven't done anything in an open-source way since 2019 (GPT-2). GPT-3 and ChatGPT are closed.

      That hes been a wide criticism, that they reneged on the whole promise of their very name.

  • ChatGPT is one of those impressive techs that will never develop into something lucrative. It's an fun toy. That's all. Any legitimate use is a landmine.

    He should take the money then start cashing out his own ownership stake.

    • It's helped me fix a programming bug on a pet project I'd been working for weeks to solve. Solved it in seconds.

      It helped me throw together a multi-page work document for leadership they they loved. The bot did 95% of the work.

      I, for one, would be happy to pay a monthly fee. I know I'm not alone.

    • ChatGPT is one of those impressive techs that will never develop into something lucrative. It's an fun toy. That's all. Any legitimate use is a landmine.

      He should take the money then start cashing out his own ownership stake.

      Possibly, there's a lot of folks looking for ways to use it so I wouldn't be surprised if someone finds a good value proposition.

      As an investor, my worry would be how unique it is. There's more than one image generator [medium.com], I don't see why we won't see another group come up with something on par with ChatGPT.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        ChatGPT is a combination of a couple of pretty familiar techniques. You can bet there are a bunch of people working on open versions right now.

        OpenAI isn't very open, so anything they do is a big target for other researchers.

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      There are some areas where it has a good chance of being lucrative.

      Customer service chatbots. It would probably keep a larger number of customer service requests from ever needing a human. This seems like an example where the training data could be without the legal landmine of unknown copyright.

      For programming, I'm not seeing it. So far in the admittedly impressive demos, it seemed that you had to describe requirements in a tedious way, and often have to identify a misbehavior, describe the misbehavior,

      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        Also, search. As good as google is, it often fails to provide good response when the keywords are ambiguous even if you try to provide something a natural language processing engine would categorize correctly.

        • ChatGPT prefers to just make shit up.

          If you ask it for references for scientific work, it will spit out a bunch of fake references.

          This is not a tool. It's a whizz bang toy. Anyone who tries to use it as a tool will quickly discover how little value this has in the market.

      • Customer service? I doubt it.

        There is absolutely no way to know what it will say. It has no idea what it's saying. If your chat bot starts offering refunds, you have to honor them. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine giving the wrong instructions for using some safety feature.

        Customer service banks will not want this.

        • by Junta ( 36770 )

          Well, for one, I could imagine them tweaking it to avoid certain 'taboos' like 'refund' 'reimburse', 'give back', etc. Also a boilerplate statement saying that the initial conversation is not authorized to offer refunds, even if it says so. Even if refunds were to happen, if it saves a few headcount, the occasional aggressive refund would be acceptable. For example, today even for things that are $500, there is frequently a preference to just pay that price rather than escalate to expensive tier to try to

  • Competitors (Score:4, Insightful)

    by anonymouscoward52236 ( 6163996 ) on Thursday January 05, 2023 @08:02PM (#63183514)

    They'd better hurry up, lol. There are many ChatGPT competitors in the mix. And if this becomes a DALLE2 -> Stable Diffusion situation, then ChatGPT may become a thing of the past quite quickly if there is a free option and ChatGPT begins to charge.

  • If their S-1 was not written by ChatGPT, they're sub-capable fluff.
  • ChatGPT is a nice party-trick and can do simple things with low reliability, but that does not make it worth even $1B....

  • are the talks done with the help of ChatGPT ?!?

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