As investors are growing increasingly concerned over an AI bubble, triggering a major tech selloff earlier this week, OpenAI is still in full-steam-ahead mode.
During the Wall Street Journal‘s Tech Live conference on Wednesday, the ChatGPT maker’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar revealed that the company has no plans of going public, contradicting rumors.
“IPO is not on the cards right now,” she said at the event. “We are continuing to get the company into a state of constantly stepping up into the scale we are at, so I don’t want to get wrapped around an IPO axle.”
And as the company eschews a public listing, Friar said that it’s looking to create an “ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental” so it can take on even more debt.
She hinted that the US government could “backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen,” but didn’t elaborate any further on how such an arrangement would work.
Her comments were bound to raise plenty of eyebrows on Wall Street. OpenAI has been losing a staggering amount of money and has yet to prove it can deliver on a return on investment. Does that really make it a prime candidate for governmental backing? Could Briar be implying that the government should bail OpenAI out in case things go south?
It didn’t take long for Friar to take to LinkedIn and renege on her previous statement, saying that “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments.”
“I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point,” she added.
Even CEO Sam Altman intervened on X-formerly-Twitter in an apparent attempt to calm spooked investors, saying that “we do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.”
“We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market,” he wrote, arguing that it makes “a lot of sense” for the government to have its own “strategic national reserve of computing power.”
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