Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar called the company’s legal challenge to stop the creator from becoming one a competitive ploy.
“We hope that he does not continue to resort to the use of law and lawfare to compete,” said Friar in an interview on Bloomberg House during the World Economic Forum in Davos, this Tuesday (21). Musk, who owns OpenAI rival xAI and was previously part of the team that launched OpenAI as a nonprofit, said .
“Building AI is a capital-intensive business, and I think even he recognized very early on that we would need to be much more than a nonprofit,” she said.
Friar is helping the artificial intelligence company secure financing and create new revenue streams. She said the company will likely have to continue raising funds, but weighed the pros and cons of an IPO. An initial public offering could give OpenAI access to new types of financing, such as structured debt, which could reduce the costs of raising capital, she said in the interview. The next cutting-edge GPT model will likely cost billions of dollars to develop, Friar said.
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Still, going public could force the company to focus on pleasing investors at a time when AI requires enormous funding to develop next-generation models. Friar said he would have to “bring in the right type of investor” who understands the technology development process.
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“It’s always a potential station in the journey we’re on, but I don’t want to make it the destination,” she said.
In October, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that gave the company a $157 billion valuation, in one of the largest private investments ever made to fund innovations in its AI.
OpenAI is moving into the “world of agents,” reasoning models that can do the work of human workers, she said. The first use cases are to “solve everyday problems”, such as planning dinner for clients or acting as software development or research assistants for companies.
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Friar said many corporate customers, a key growth area for OpenAI, have learned about the company’s products in their personal lives. The business model is “really expanding across all sectors of the economy,” Friar said. For example, Morgan Stanley uses OpenAI’s technology in parts of the bank’s wealth management and investment banking businesses, she said.
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