Abu Dhabi tech investment firm MGX in talks to invest in OpenAI: WSJ reports

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Abu Dhabi technology investment firm MGX is reportedly in talks with OpenAI as part of a multibillion-dollar fundraising round for the startup behind ChatGPT.

Sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that MGX, which the UAE created earlier this year to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) projects, hasn’t determined the size of a potential investment in OpenAI.

OpenAI is in talks to raise $6.5bn from investors at a valuation of $150bn, and the new valuation will cement the ChatGPT creator’s position as one of the most valuable startups in the world.

Venture-capital firm Thrive Capital has committed $1bn and will lead the round, while Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia are in talks to also invest, according to a Bloomberg report.

The potential investment would bring the Gulf state closer to one of the world’s leading AI companies and one of the most valuable private startups in the US.

Last October, OpenAI teamed up with Abu Dhabi AI behemoth G42 Group as part of an expansion within the UAE and the broader GCC region. The partnership with G42 is aimed at delivering OpenAI’s generative AI models across sectors spanning financial services to energy and healthcare.

The UAE created MGX in March to invest in AI companies and the infrastructure required to make the technology more widely available. The investment firm counts sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment and G42 as its founding partners.

OpenAI’s reasoning AI

Meanwhile, OpenAI said on Thursday that it was launching its “Strawberry” series of AI models.

The AI models are designed to spend more time processing answers to queries and solving challenging problems in math, coding and science – a critical step towards achieving humanlike cognition in machines.

Dubbed o1, the AI models are touted as a sign of the progression of technological capabilities over the past few years as companies race to create ever more sophisticated AI systems.

OpenAI said in a blog post that the o1 model scored 83 per cent on the qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad, compared with 13 per cent for its previous model, GPT-4o.

The company said the model also improved performance on competitive programming questions and exceeded human PhD-level accuracy on a benchmark of science problems.

Founded in 2015, OpenAI has been at the centre of the technology industry’s rapid shift toward AI, kicking off an investing frenzy with the 2022 debut of its easy-to-use chatbot, ChatGPT. The company’s products, which can generate realistic images and human-sounding text from just a few words of prompting, have captured the attention of both consumers and investors.

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