“‘I don’t want to be sued by … public market, Wall Street etc, so no, not that interested.’”
It’s arguably the hottest technology startup in the world, but OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman is in no hurry to take the Microsoft Corp.-backed company public.
“I don’t want to be sued by … public market, Wall Street etc, so no, not that interested,” Altman said Tuesday in response to a question at a conference in Abu Dhabi on whether he intends to take the creator of ChatGPT-4 public.
“When we develop super intelligence, we are likely to make some decisions that most investors would look at very strangely,” Altman said.
Altman’s reluctance and carefully crafted words were grounded in a fevered political climate over the deleterious impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, privacy and civil rights. On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, including Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., called for a summer summit on the potential and perils of AI.
Yet nearly every tech company is plunging into the market as enterprise businesses and consumers increasingly embrace AI. On Monday, Apple Inc.
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-0.21%
unveiled Vision Pro, its $3,500 augmented-reality headset, following AI-related announcements in recent weeks from Microsoft
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Alphabet Inc.’s
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Google, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
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Adobe Inc.
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SAP
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ServiceNow Inc.
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and others.
Read more: Is Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset worth $3,499? Read this before shelling out.
They’ve all followed the lead of OpenAI, which started as a non-profit organization but later created a hybrid “capped-profit” company. So far, it has raised $10 billion from Microsoft at a valuation of nearly $30 billion.
“We have a very strange structure,” Altman said. “We have this cap-to-profit thing.”
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