The artificial intelligence (AI) race is developing at extreme speed, and the competition is increasing, challenging the king, OpenAI. In a recent discovery, the ChatGPT maker has asked investors not to fund five competing startups.
Essentially, venture capitalist (VC) deals and startup investments can go far beyond just providing capital to fund a fast-growing business. These deals can also ask for advisors, networking, infrastructure, or, in this case, to avoid investing in the competition.
In particular, OpenAI’s list includes Claude developer Anthropic, Elon Musk’s xAI, the search engines Perplexity and Glean, and Safe SuperIntelligence (SSI), developed by OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Reuters acquired this list from undisclosed sources and shared it in a report on October 2.
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As reported, the list surged as investors like Thrive Capital and Tiger Global deployed $6.6 billion into OpenAI. This special request, however, has no legal consequences but highlights how deals can be made to maintain a project’s leadership.
How do OpenAI’s competitors differ from ChatGPT?
Asking investors to avoid funding specific competitors signals how much OpenAI could fear them, trying to delay development through the lack of capital. Overall, this is a validation of good work being done by these startups, entering Sam Altman’s radar.
On X, a commentator congratulated Deedy – Glean’s founding team – for “making it to the enemy hit list of Sam Altman.” Glean develops AI enterprise search solutions, which OpenAI still does not do but intends to, as sources suggest.
Other competitors, like Perplexity and xAI, can search for data in real-time, offering up-to-date results from the web and X, respectively. Conversely, ChatGPT-like models are limited to a database they were previously trained on and could be outdated.
Moreover, as Finbold reported, Anthropic’s Claude-derivated models are constantly improving to beat OpenAI’s products on different benchmarks. Finally, speculation has surged on OpenAI’s co-founder Sutskever’s product, which is still under development, the SSI.
“D–. Ilya hasn’t even built anything yet with the new company and he’s already in the top five threats for Sam Altman. I knew he was skilled and integral to OpenAI, but it suggests his technical ability alone would be enough to catch up, even if he’s restarting from scratch.”
– Andrew Ruiz, on X
With this list coming to the public, OpenAI’s requests could backfire, driving other investors’ attention to these startups. The AI race promises to intensify on all fronts, especially those related to investing and funding competition.
