On December 1st, OpenAI announced that it had acquired shares in the private equity platform Thrive Holdings without paying a single cent in cash - instead, by deploying employees, opening up models and product interfaces in exchange for "meaningful" equity, and sharing future investment returns. Since the parent company of Thrive Holdings is also the main investor of OpenAI, Thrive Capital, this "investment for resources" collaboration has been viewed by outsiders as a typical AI closed-loop transaction.
According to the agreement, OpenAI will first "embed" engineering and product teams in the fields of accounting and IT services, helping the invested companies accelerate and reduce costs; in return, it can use these companies' business data for model training, while enjoying equity appreciation and financial distribution. A source revealed that OpenAI is seeking to replicate this model with more private equity firms, to obtain vertical industry data and real-world scenarios with zero capital expenditure.
For OpenAI, which is valued at $500 billion, this move not only alleviates the cash flow pressure caused by high computing costs, but also provides an "outsourced" implementation team for its large-scale expansion into enterprise customers. However, the market also worries that funds and equity may just circulate among a few players, potentially further increasing the risk of an AI bubble.
