Last week, Altman said in an interview with CNBC that he was in no rush to take OpenAI public, and that he would do it “when it makes sense”.
In its statement on Monday, OpenAI said it was revealing its IPO plans because “we expect it to leak”.
The company noted that revealing its plans and its decision to go public “is a complicated set of tradeoffs”.
Having filed the necessary paperwork for review with the SEC, the company says it now has “the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best”.
By listing on the stock market, OpenAI will need to become more transparent about its financials and product pipeline.
IPO listings can also deter private funding and make deals slower or less appealing because companies must disclose more information, Crowley said.
For OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX, which also owns the controversial AI chatbot Grok, selling shares to the public is likely to give them billions of dollars in capital.
One of the most costly aspects of running an AI company is what is referred to as “compute,” which typically describes the infrastructure and processing power required to build, train, test and then make available its offerings to the public, such as a chatbot.
OpenAI’s compute costs are estimated to be over $100bn a year, external, while its revenue, the money it actually makes from its business, is a fraction of that.
SpaceX is also far from a profitable business.
Anthropic, however, has told investors that it expects to turn a profit in the first half of this year, as it says sales of its Claude product and related services have grown significantly.
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