OpenAI doubles losses to $540 million in 2022 due to rising ChatGPT expenses

OpenAI, the AI research company behind popular language models like ChatGPT and Dall-E 2, has reportedly doubled its losses to $540 million in 2022 due to soaring development expenses for its chatbot. The company is now looking to raise as much as $100 billion in the coming years to fund its goal of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI advanced enough to improve its own capabilities.

According to The Information, OpenAI's losses are also due to the high costs of employment, including luring skilled staff like engineers and research experts from Google. The cost of training machine-learning models and acquiring fresh data sets is also expected to escalate, as more customers use AI technology and the company trains future versions of the software.

While OpenAI's revenue has picked up, reaching an annual pace of hundreds of millions of dollars weeks after the launch of a paid version in February, costs are likely to continue to rise. As the AI arms race intensifies, data costs are also expected to skyrocket as platforms like Reddit and StackOverflow introduce policies that charge AI firms access to their previously free data sets.

CEO Sam Altman has suggested that OpenAI may try to raise $100 billion to achieve its goal of developing AGI, a move that some experts believe could lead to a monopoly on AI. OpenAI has already taken steps in this direction, buying the domain AI.com and filing for a trademark on 'GPT.' However, acquiring fresh data sets for its software is a point of contention, as companies like Samsung are wary of their proprietary data slipping into the ChatGPT data pool.

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, tried to take over as CEO in 2018 but walked away after pushback from Altman and others. Musk has expressed concerns that OpenAI's profit incentives could interfere with the ethics of AI models.

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