OpenAI is reportedly racing toward a fourth-quarter IPO that would test investor faith in the giant startup—and in the AI boom itself. The AI lab has begun informal talks with Wall Street banks—according to The Wall Street Journal—in an effort to beat rival AI startup Anthropic to market.

While OpenAI boasts a $500 billion valuation, it doesn't expect to turn a profit until 2030. The AI lab wouldn't be the first unprofitable company to go public, of course. Amazon remained unprofitable for years after its 1997 IPO as it prioritized growth. But OpenAI is also burning through billions at an immense rate as it rushes to build massive data centers to train and run its AI models. Investment bank HSBC projects that between now and 2030, OpenAI will face a cumulative $207 billion gap between the revenue it generates and what it needs to spend—despite bringing in as much as $213 billion in revenue over that span.

If OpenAI can successfully IPO while burning billions and projecting losses through 2030, it's a sign the AI boom still has room to run. But if investors balk—if the IPO stumbles or gets repriced at a discount—it will signal that the market may have finally reached its tolerance threshold for hype over fundamentals.—Beatrice Nolan

David Silver, a well-known Google DeepMind researcher who played a critical role in many of the company’s most famous breakthroughs, has left the company to form a startup in London called Ineffable Intelligence. 

The company is actively recruiting AI researchers and is seeking venture capital funding, a source said, and will aim to build “an endlessly learning superintelligence that self-discovers the foundations of all knowledge,” according to a person familiar with Silver's thinking.

Silver is well known for his work on reinforcement learning, a way of training AI models from experience rather than historical data, and has been considered one of its most dogmatic proponents, arguing that it was the only way to create artificial intelligence that could one day surpass human knowledge.

Silver has told friends he wants to get back to the “awe and wonder of solving the hardest problems in AI” and sees superintelligence—or AI that would be smarter than any human and potentially smarter than all of humanity—as the biggest unsolved challenge in the field, according to the person familiar with his thinking. —Jeremy Kahn