Report: OpenAI in Talks With Singapore-Owned Investor Temasek
Singapore’s state-owned investment group Temasek is reportedly in talks to back OpenAI.
Assuming a deal went forward, it would mark the first time the artificial intelligence (AI) company has gotten an investment from a state-backed group, the Financial Times (FT) reported Tuesday (March 5), citing sources with knowledge of the talks.
Those sources said senior executives from Temasek have met with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman several times in the last few months. Another source said the investment group — one of the largest in the world — had at first wanted to take part in Altman’s venture capital fund Hydrazine Capital, but more recent discussions had included OpenAI itself.
PYMNTS has contacted both OpenAI and Temasek for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.
As the FT noted, the negotiations follow Altman’s recent plans to embark on a semiconductor project that would let his company scale back its reliance on chips made by Nvidia.
Last month, Altman wrote on X that creating a “massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness. OpenAI will try to help.”
This effort, according to Altman, could cost as much as $7 trillion, which would place everyday tech investors out of the running.
With that in mind, Altman has turned to investors with bigger bank accounts, including Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, and now, the sources say, Temasek, which has a $287 billion portfolio.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS earlier this week examined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent claim that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a term for an AI that can reason like a human — could be just a few years away.
Experts aren’t that sure. They’re not even sure about what AGI really means, tech adviser Vaclav Vincalek told PYMNTS in an interview, because there’s no exact definition of what constitutes intelligence.
“It has been the subject of millennia of debate in scientific and philosophical circles,” he added. “Since the ‘I’ is not clearly defined (or even understood), it is impossible to create a specification against which the technology people can build the system.”
And Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief scientist and a pioneer in deep learning, has previously argued against Huang’s statements that AGI is on the horizon, contending that current AI systems are still decades away from reaching a level of sentience that includes common sense.
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