7.53am BST
Introduction: OpenAI in talks for share sale at $500bn valuation
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.
The artificial intelligence boom is continuing to excite investors, creating the possibility of huge earnings for the companies and individuals at the heart of the AI race.
Overnight, news has broken that OpenAI, the group behind the ChatGPT chatbot, is in talks about a share sale that would value the company at $500bn.
That would be a serious jump on OpenAI’s previous valuation of $300bn, set in a financing round in March, and underline its status as one of the largest privately held companies in the world.
The talks centre on a potential sale of stock for current and former employees, Bloomberg reports, adding that existing investors including Thrive Capital have approached OpenAI about buying some of these shares. As OpenAI isn’t listed on the stock market, such a secondary stock sale would allow present and ex-staff to cash in.
The mooted share sale comes as companies race to test, and roll out, artificial intelligence systems, which has sent the value of chipmaker Nvidia surging over $4trn last month
Shares in Palantir, the software analytics and AI company, jumped almost 8% yesterday after it beat Wall Street estimates and hiked its full-year guidance due to the artificial intelligence boom.
OpenAI is riding this wave too. The Financial Times reports that OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue — a measure of expected revenue from subscriptions commonly used by start-ups — has surged to $12bn, and the company is apparently expecting $20bn or more in ARR by the end of 2025.
Yesterday, OpenAI launched new freely available artificial intelligence models, in a challenge to rivals including Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Chinese rival DeepSeek.
The ChatGPT developer has announced two “open weight” large language models, which are free to download and can be customised by developers
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company was excited to add to a stack of freely available AI models “based on democratic values … and for wide benefit”, adding:
“We’re excited to make this model, the result of billions of dollars of research, available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible.”
The agenda
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7am German factory orders for June
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8.30am BST: eurozone construction PMI report for July
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9.30am BST: UK construction PMI report for July
