Reuters news agency reported information citing directly involved individuals. Four people stated that approximately 7 years ago, Intel received a proposal to invest in OpenAI, which at the time was a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. They were researching Generative AI topics.
Executives of Intel and OpenAI had several discussions during 2017-2018. The investment proposal had various elements, such as OpenAI offering Intel to hold 15% of the shares by paying $1 billion in cash and additionally offering to increase shareholding by another 15% in exchange for Intel selling processing hardware to OpenAI at cost price.
The negotiations did not make progress. Reports indicate that Bob Swan, the CEO of Intel at the time, believed that Generative AI might not enter the market in the near future, making this investment less appealing. On the other hand, OpenAI’s perspective in negotiating with Intel was to reduce reliance on NVIDIA’s processing chips and to design fundamental AI processing structures themselves.
However, this information reflects past events. If Intel had decided to invest in OpenAI back then, the AI advancements and market opportunities for both Intel and OpenAI could have taken a different turn, possibly not what we see today.
Both OpenAI and Intel declined to comment on the Reuters report.
TLDR: 7 years ago, Intel considered investing in OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company working on Generative AI. Negotiations didn’t progress, but if Intel had invested, it could have changed the AI landscape. Both companies declined to comment on the report.
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