AI in Business
OpenAI's $100 Billion Funding + Sam Altman Refuses to Hold Darios Hand...
20 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is OpenAI's recent funding round and its implications?
OpenAI is closing in on one of the largest private fundraising rounds in tech history. It's absolutely massive. Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today, we're talking about some reports coming out of Bloomberg in relation to a $100 billion round of funding that OpenAI is going to be doing, putting them at an $850 billion valuation. This is absolutely astronomical.
And also, there's a bunch of awkward moments happening in India between Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeo, who've been in this death feud for the last, I would say, couple months based off of Anthropic putting out these kind of attack ads at the Super Bowl on OpenAI and Sam Altman
Chapter 2: How is the rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic evolving?
firing back and then they had a very awkward moment where they're supposed to be holding hands in India. Things did not go according to plan. I want to break that down and also talk about some interesting analytics coming out of OpenAI in regards to their users.
Chapter 3: What are the details of OpenAI's expansion efforts in India?
So it's basically a whole bunch of AI news for OpenAI today. Before we get into all of that, if you want to try the latest models from OpenAI or Anthropic or Grok or Gemini or 11 Labs for Audio,
Chapter 4: What user analytics are emerging from OpenAI's operations in India?
and get them all in one place, I'd love for you to check out my platform, AIbox.ai. We've just completed an entire redesign of our product from the ground up. So you can click the link in the description if you want to check that out.
For $20 a month, we have cheaper tiers as well, but for 20 bucks a month, you get access to every major AI model in the world, in the same place, and the ability to go and create any AI tool you want just by describing it.
Chapter 5: How is OpenAI planning to monetize its services in India?
So if you want to go check it out, it's AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link in the description. OK, so according to Bloomberg, ChatGPT is getting really close to a deal.
Chapter 6: What are the competitive dynamics in the AI industry right now?
They're going to be raising $100 billion. Like I mentioned, the valuation is going to be over $850 billion. And all of these numbers are going to top some of the earlier expectations. People thought it was going to be about $800 billion.
Chapter 7: How does OpenAI's valuation compare to its competitors?
$30 billion. Now it's gonna be 150. I think this really shows that there is a ton of investor appetite for even the biggest of these AI frontier models, which makes it feel like this quote unquote AI bubble we've heard talked about so frequently and so often, just doesn't feel as close like these companies just keep raising more and more money. There's a lot of demand for this.
The costs are rising. I think the competition is increasing.
Chapter 8: What future strategies is OpenAI considering for growth?
But as Bloomberg says, OpenAI's pre-money valuation is still going to be about $730 billion. So I think that right now comes at a really important moment. OpenAI is burning through insane amounts of money and they're not slowing down in any way, shape or form. They're scaling up their infrastructure. They're training new models. They're expanding globally all around the world.
We have tons of reports out of, I think, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity. They're all aggressively expanding into India right now. And I think even while they're moving perhaps closer to profitability, there's come in some recent weeks, they confirmed that they've started testing ads inside of ChatGPT for the free tier. So this is a move that might unlock even more revenue streams
But also it risks a bit of user backlash if they don't execute this correctly on X when they first kind of made the announcement. There's a lot of people complaining about it. At the end of the day, I think it's not shocking. I mean, these things cost money. So if they're going to charge money for them, or like throw ads on there, I'm not surprised.
What I will say is I was surprised that their $8 a month tier, which they rolled out, does have ads embedded. I mean, I would feel like they have a $20 a month tier, which I personally pay for. And I'm like, yeah, that's fine. I don't want to see ads because I'm paying 20 bucks a month. And then when they had the $8 a month tier and they're like, and we will have ads there.
I was like, oof, like maybe rate limit people more. Maybe don't give them everything. But like ads on that just felt, I don't know. It feels bad to pay, you know, $8. And if that's you, if you're on the $8 a month tier and you don't want ads, you could just get AI box. I mean, you know, shameless plug for my own platform, AIbox.ai. It's $8.99 a month and there is no ads on there.
So if you want to get access to that, you can. But in any case, I think right now they have a lot of momentum. There's a whole bunch of, I think the early tranches of all of this funding are expected to come from basically everyone you'd expect the money to come from. Amazon is said to be in talks to put in about $50 billion. SoftBank is apparently preparing to put in about $30 billion. And
And Nvidia might invest up to 20 billion. Microsoft also is putting money in. We don't have an exact number. And I think there's some other venture firms. There's also some sovereign wealth funds that are expected to join later. And maybe like there's going to be another round after this that they're like already working on, which might even push the entire valuation a little bit higher.
Or maybe they'll just say, you know, they'll take the money later, but then tack it onto this round. And so saying Nvidia. You know, instead of just being like we raised 100 billion, they'll be like we raised 120 or 30 or 50. So, I mean, these things could balloon. We've seen this happen for other companies like Anthropic as well in recent months.
I think right now all of the fundraising momentum is coming at a time where there's definitely a lot of there's a lot of competition. And there's also a backdrop of a really high profile gathering in New Delhi. There is the A.I. or there's the India AI Impact Summit. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, and also Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadeo, they had a really awkward moment at this whole conference.
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