OpenAI's ChatGPT not going public anytime soon, confirms CEO Sam Altman

During a conference in Abu Dhabi, chief executive Sam Altman stated that OpenAI, which is supported by Microsoft and is responsible for ChatGPT, does not currently have any intentions of becoming a publicly traded company in the near future.

“When we develop super intelligence, we are likely to make some decisions that most investors would look at very strangely. I don’t want to be sued by ... public market, Wall Street etc, so no, not that interested,” Altman replied to a question on whether he will take OpenAI public, reported the Business Times. 

With a focus on expanding its computing capacity, OpenAI has secured an impressive $10 billion in funding from Microsoft, valuing the company at nearly $30 billion.

“We have a very strange structure. We have this cap to profit thing,” he said.

Initially established as a non-profit organization, OpenAI later evolved into a hybrid "capped-profit" company. This strategic move enabled OpenAI to raise external funding while ensuring that the original non-profit mission continues to be prioritised and benefited from the development. 

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a research organisation with the goal of advancing artificial intelligence (AI). The co-founders of OpenAI included Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba. 

Musk played a significant role in the early stages but later stepped down from his board seat to avoid any potential conflicts of interest with his other ventures. 

OpenAI gained attention for its research breakthroughs and contributions to the field of AI. They focused on developing state-of-the-art AI models and technologies while emphasising openness and collaboration. 

Notably, OpenAI released the popular language model GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating coherent and contextually relevant text.