Could OpenAI soon be worth one trillion dollars? Initially, the notion sounds absurd.
Sam Altman’s company, established merely eight years ago as a competitor to Google’s DeepMind, likely remains loss-making, and savvy venture capitalists and private equity investors reportedly valued it last month at a little over $80 billion during its most recent round of fundraising.
Yet the 1-trillion-dollar mark is what former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee—himself an AI investor—is predicting.
Speaking to Fortune’s editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell, Sinovation Ventures chairman Kai-Fu Lee said he believes OpenAI will reach the rarefied altitudes reserved for only a half-dozen megacap stocks with proven business models.
“I am very bullish on their future. They’ve really done an admirable and unbelievable job executing,” the entrepreneur told participants at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Hong Kong on Wednesday.
“OpenAI will likely be a trillion-dollar company in the not-too-distant future.”
Given there are no current expectations that a company still controlled by a nonprofit board will go public, it could conceivably become the first to hit that milestone held entirely in private hands.
Pressed for a more specific time horizon, Lee estimated it may need only two or three years before reaching such a valuation.
“I think that’s the likely outcome—of course they could misexecute,” he said, adding a competitor could conceivably steal leadership away from Altman’s team as well.
OpenAI is the ‘gold standard’ in this future technology
Arguably neither Satya Nadella’s Microsoft—partner to OpenAI—nor Jensen Huang’s AI training chip company Nvidia would be worth their respective $3 trillion and $2 trillion market caps were it not for the breakthrough by Altman’s brilliant team of researchers.
Lee acknowledged other large language models like Anthropic’s latest generative pre-trained transformer Claude 3 were extremely promising (Amazon just upped its investment in the company by another $2.75 billion on Wednesday).
But he believed OpenAI’s optimal balance between performance and cost means its GPT-4 remains the better commercial product a full year after its launch in mid-March last year.
“Even today, GPT-4 is still the gold standard,” the former Google China president said.
That’s why if he had the choice, Lee would ideally love to invest in OpenAI, even if he does criticize its decision to abandon publishing its research—something his company 01.AI still does on sites like Hugging Face.
The venture capitalist, AI researcher, and startup founder believes a tenfold increase in value would be nothing out of the ordinary for a company like OpenAI, given he believes the artificial intelligence will prove bigger than personal computers, the internet, and even electricity.
“This is by far the most advanced and most amazing technology, compared to anything, by a factor of 10,” Lee said.
