Following Elon Musk’s announcement to raise up to $4 billion for his AI startup xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, held a series of meetings with Fortune 500 executives in San Francisco, New York, and London to present AI solutions for businesses.
This move puts OpenAI in competition with its investor, Microsoft, Reuters reports.
Musk aims to raise between $3 to $4 billion for Grok, targeting an $18 billion valuation for the company in the next 2-3 weeks post-funding, as per Trading View.
These events showcase OpenAI’s ambition to tap into corporate markets globally, potentially overlapping with Microsoft’s domain. These private meetings, which took place last week in the U.S. and this week in London, were not publicly disclosed.
Sources reveal that Altman addressed over 100 executives in each city, accompanied by COO Brad Lightcap. They showcased ChatGPT Enterprise, software for integrating with OpenAI’s AI services, and their text-to-video models.
OpenAI assures that customer data for ChatGPT Enterprise remains confidential and won’t be used for training AI models. OpenAI highlighted various applications like call-center management and translation, mentioning that their consumer chatbot is already used by over 92% of Fortune 500 companies.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s major investor, provides OpenAI’s technology via Azure cloud and offers Microsoft 365 Copilot, a productivity tool powered by OpenAI’s models.
Some attendees questioned the need for ChatGPT Enterprise when they already use Microsoft’s services. Altman and Lightcap responded that opting for OpenAI’s enterprise service allows direct collaboration, access to latest models, and customized AI solutions.
Both OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment on the meetings.
OpenAI, previously valued at $86 billion, aims to diversify its revenue since ChatGPT’s surge in popularity in 2022. It’s approaching its $1 billion revenue goal for 2024. With the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise and Team, user numbers surged from 150,000 in January to over 600,000 recently.
Lightcap, spearheading enterprise adoption at OpenAI, has engaged with Hollywood studios to promote their Sora video creation tool. This technology, generating videos from text descriptions, has garnered interest and concerns in the creative industry. Two major studios expressed interest in exploring Sora, but concerns about video sources, output reliability, and copyright protection remain.
Fox and News Corp previously hosted Altman at a leadership retreat last October for a Q&A session, as per insider sources.
