OpenAI Asks Investors To Avoid Five AI Startups, Including Sutskever's SSI

OpenAI asks investors not to fund their competing companies (photo: dock. pexels)

Jakarta - OpenAI, a ChatGPT developer, has asked for commitments from global investors such as Thrive Capital and Tiger Global, which have invested $6.6 billion in the company, not to fund five companies that are considered close competitors.

The list of companies includes competitors who are developing large language models such as Elon Musk's Anthropic and xAI. In addition, the new company owned by one of the founders of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, Safe Super Intelligence (SSI), is also on the list. All of these companies are currently competing with OpenAI in building big language models, which require billions of dollars in funding.

Two other AI application companies, namely the AI Perplexity search startup and the company-finding company, Glean, are also mentioned in OpenAI talks with investors. This shows that OpenAI plans to sell more of its tools to companies and end users, in line with its projected revenue growth to 11.6 billion US dollars by 2025, up from 3.7 billion US dollars this year.

Although the request is not legally binding, this move shows how OpenAI takes advantage of its appeal to secure exclusive commitments from its financial supporters amid intense competition in the AI sector that relies heavily on access to capital.

While this kind of hope is common in the venture capital world, it is not uncommon for a company to make a list as OpenAI does. Usually, venture capital investors avoid investing in direct competitors from their portfolio companies in order to maintain their reputation.

However, for end-stage investors like SoftBank and Fidelity, who have invested in xAI and OpenAI, these restrictions are vague, as they tend to spread bets across multiple companies. OpenAI's demand does not apply to previous investors and investments that have been made, but could have an impact on future fundraising efforts for OpenAI investors and the five competitors.

Initial reports regarding several companies on this list first appeared in the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.