Kevin O’Leary says he’s likely to invest in ChatGPT maker OpenAI — comparing its disruptive power to Amazon’s

“ChatGPT is certainly a threat to Google, and Google needs to know that,” he said shark tank said Star Insider in an interview published this week. About half of his own searches, he added, are now done through ChatGPT. The “loser is Google,” he said, adding “the AI ​​search wars are on.”

O’Leary indicated that he is now considering an opportunity to become an early investor in OpenAI, adding that he is “happy to be offered a piece of it”. He thinks the loss-making company’s valuation is “very, very extreme” — reportedly near the $30 billion mark — given the technology’s newness, but he said a deal was likely to be finalized in the near future.

If he invests, he told Insider it will be a modest bet: “Either it’s going to have a good result or it’s not, but I’m not going to tear down the ship or sell the farm for it.” I know there will be a lot of competition and a lot of disruption, but I definitely like being at the forefront of things.”

He prefers first movers, he added, because they have a marketing advantage.

OpenAI itself has been blown away by the amount of attention ChatGPT has generated.

“We didn’t expect this level of excitement bringing our child into the world,” said Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, this month in a Time Interview. “In fact, we even had reservations about releasing it.”

But as angel investor Elad Gil noted last month, ChatGPT’s rapid uptake, despite being down most of the time, bodes well that the product is a fit for the market. The Google graduate added that when an idea works, it works very quickly, which he’s seen repeatedly at companies he’s worked for and invested in over the years. (Gil was an early investor in Airbnb, Instacart, and Square.)

Of course, OpenAI is currently facing heavy losses, not to mention huge computational costs from all the ChatGPT users it didn’t anticipate. Microsoft’s big investments should help with that. And this week, the tech giant unveiled an update to its Bing search engine that includes ChatGPT technology.

Earlier this month, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Plus, a $20 monthly subscription that offers faster response times and better access to the chatbot when it’s otherwise down due to traffic.

After noticing the ChatGPT threat to Google, O’Leary told Insider, “The market hasn’t really penalized Google stock for it. But in a few quarters, when ChatGPT really starts earning significant subscriber fees, then we’ll see what happens.”

Learn how to navigate and build trust in your organization with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter exploring what leaders need to succeed. Login here.