OpenAI's $6.5B funding round may close as soon as next week

ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s next funding round, said to be around $6.5 billion, could close as soon as the end of next week.

That’s according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, which also reveals that OpenAI’s rumored conversion from a nonprofit org into a for-profit company is now a virtual certainty. Investors in the new round will be able to pull back their money if OpenAI doesn’t complete the transition within two years, per the WSJ.

The WSJ piece paints a picture of a startup that, while having recently hit $4 billion in revenue, is still losing billions — and is beset by internal clashes, a burnout-prone work culture, and technical delays. Researchers at the company reportedly had just nine days to safety-test GPT-4o, OpenAI’s recent flagship model, as OpenAI raced to debut the model to take attention away from Google’s annual I/O developer conference back in May.