Aug 20, 06:31 PM

OpenAI Weighs IPO and AWS-Style AI Hosting to Fund GPT-6 Push

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman told reporters in San Francisco that the artificial-intelligence company will "eventually" have to go public to fund what he described as "trillions of dollars" in long-term spending on advanced models and computing power. The company is seeking to accelerate development of GPT-6 after what Altman acknowledged was a flawed launch of GPT-5, saying, "We totally screwed up some things on the rollout." Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said in a Bloomberg interview that OpenAI is studying whether to rent out its AI-optimized data centers to other companies, an AWS-style business that could offset the steep cost of operating large language models. The idea is not an immediate priority, she added, because the firm first needs to secure adequate computing capacity for its own products. Altman indicated that traditional chat applications are "already saturated" and that future growth will come from encrypted services, robotics and potential brain-computer interfaces. He cautioned, however, that shortages of graphics-processing units continue to limit how quickly GPT-6 can be trained and released.