INTERVIEW OPENAI FROM A RESEARCH LAB FUNDED TO WALL STREET

🤖 OpenAI from a Research Lab funded to Wall Street: My Interview on the upcoming IPO and the Future of AI at Al Qahira News Live TV.

💡 OpenAI founding philosophy by Elon Musk was a non-profit entreprise of intelligence serving humanity against Google AI, and not for shareholder profit. But today, the company is preparing for an IPO that could value it at up to 1 Trillion dollars — the largest ever in the tech sector.

🎙️ During the interview, I highlighted that OpenAI has moved from a mission-driven lab to a commercial powerhouse, while pretending to preserve its ethical core by structuring itself as a Public Benefit Corporation — a model designed to balance profit with responsibility toward society.

💰 AI is extremely expensive, OpenAI now needs around $500 billion to build its new Stargate infrastructure — a vast network of data centers designed to host next-generation AI models — and nearly $7 billion each year just to train its systems. Listing on the stock market gives it access to global capital beyond what any single investor, even Microsoft, can provide.

I also underlined that Microsoft currently owns 27 % of OpenAI, following multi-billion-dollar investments. Going public allows OpenAI to diversify its funding sources and avoid being overly dependent on one corporate partner.

📈 Moving from a $150–200 billion valuation just a year during Microsoft acquisition ago to a potential $1 trillion seems unrealistic and bubble like. The company’s revenues are estimated around $12 billion annually, while its expenses exceed that by several multiples! For now, the valuation reflects expectations more than earnings — the belief that whoever dominates AI infrastructure will dominate the digital economy of the future.

We also discussed the broader impact on competition and employment. The AI race is already fierce:

🇺🇸 Google Gemini: estimated valuation ~$200–300 billion. Invests $90–93 billion in 2025 capex, mostly in AI and data centers — “tens of billions” is accurate.

🇺🇸 xAI (Grok): valued about $200 billion, raised $10 billion so far, with plans to invest tens of billions in compute over the next few years.

🇺🇸 Perplexity AI: valued around $20 billion, raised $200 million — investing hundreds of millions, not tens of billions.

🇫🇷 Mistral AI: valued about $6 billion, investing hundreds of millions in open-source AI and European cloud infrastructure.

⚠️ None of these players are profitable yet, but all are racing to secure market dominance and data access before the others.

This competition will mean faster tools but still not capable of reasoning (see my conference about this). For the job market, it represents a major transformation (14,000 layoffs at Amazon linked to AI integration). Yet clearly an AI bubble is bloating fast... meanwhile #Bitcoin and Crypto marketcap is already above 3 to 4 Trillion USD showing the importance of this foundational evolution. 

Link to the live interview : https://youtu.be/fT4qBld4m6g?si=rcbe2LPee74a6uXa