Ilya proved himself as a leader, scientist, and engineer over the past decade with OpenAI for creating break-through after break-through that no one else had.
He’s raised enough to compete at the level of Grok, Claude, et al.
He’s offering investors a pure play AGI investment, possibly one of the only organizations available to do so.
Who else would you give $1B to pursue that?
That’s how investors think. There are macro trends, ambitious possibilities on the through line, and the rare people who might actually deliver.
A $5B valuation is standard dilation, no crazy ZIRP style round here.
If you haven’t seen investing at this scale in person it’s hard to appreciate that capital allocation just happens with a certain number of zeros behind it & some people specialize in making the 9 zero decisions.
Yes, it’s predicated on his company being worth more than $500B at some point 10 years down the line.
If they build AGI, that is a very cheap valuation.
Think how ubiquitous Siri, Alexa, chatGPT are and how terrible/not useful/wrong they’ve been.
There’s not a significant amount of demand or distribution risk here. Building the infrastructure to use smarter AI is the tech world’s obsession globally.
If AGI works, in any capacity or at any level, it will have a lot of big customers.