Models & Labs · United States

US venture deal value reaches record $515.8B as exits fail to keep pace

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · 8h ago

Photograph · SiliconANGLE

Giant artificial intelligence rounds have pushed U.S. venture capital deal value about 44% past its previous annual record with a quarter still to go, according to the quarterly PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released today, but the exits needed to return that money to investors have not kept pace.

Much of the $515.8 billion invested in the first nine months of the year went to OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC, which between them raised more than $200 billion in the first half. Without those rounds, PitchBook’s analysts said, the dollar totals have held to much the same trend since late 2024.

Third-quarter deal value fell about 40%, to $98.4 billion, and most of the drop came out of venture-growth rounds. Startups kept closing deals at a near-record pace regardless. PitchBook counts an estimated 5,012 in the quarter, and its records show only one busier quarter, at the start of 2022.

AI accounts for a record 82.7% of the year’s deal value, although its share of each quarter has been shrinking since January and fell to 65.9% in the third. Databricks Inc. took the quarter’s largest check at $5 billion. That was “a far cry” from the triple-digit billions frontier labs raised earlier in the year, the report said.

PitchBook’s bigger worry is how that money gets back out. Nizar Tarhuni, executive vice president of research and market intelligence at PitchBook, said “the real story sits on the exit side.” In his view the initial public offering pipeline keeps slipping further out, leaving sellers to lean on mergers and acquisitions “to get anything done at all.”

One transaction carried the quarter’s exit numbers. Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor developer Anysphere Inc. accounted for 53.1% of third-quarter exit value on its own. PitchBook ranks it as the second-largest acquisition of a venture-backed company on record, behind SpaceX’s takeover of xAI Inc. earlier this year.

Strip it out and the quarter’s exits come to $53 billion, which would be the lowest since late 2024. Salesforce Inc.’s $3.6 billion deal for customer service AI company Fin tied with Autodesk Inc.’s purchase of MaintainX Inc. as the next largest.

PitchBook described the quarter’s listings as “rather mundane.” Healthcare accounted for 12 of the 18 venture-backed companies that went public, and none was an AI company of the sort Tarhuni said the market needs for liquidity. Each of the past three years produced fewer new listings in total than 2026 has managed through September. PitchBook called that “a low bar to cross.”

Neither of the two biggest AI developers has listed yet. OpenAI has reportedly ruled out going public this year, and Anthropic has pushed its offering back by a month to November. PitchBook’s exit model gives Anthropic an 86% chance of an IPO within a year. OpenAI’s odds are 12%.

That leaves a long line of private companies waiting their turn. The count of startups valued at $1 billion or more hit a record 992 at the end of September, with a combined value of $5.7 trillion. The 179 new unicorns minted this year outnumber the IPOs of any year but 2021.

Companies that do sell are often taking far less than their last private price. Bending Spoons SpA bought Airtable Inc. for $1.3 billion, down from an $11.7 billion valuation, and its purchase of workplace collaboration platform Miro is expected to close in the fourth quarter at $1.4 billion. Miro had raised its Series C at $17.5 billion. On Forge Global Holdings Inc.’s secondary marketplace, shares in companies that last raised money in 2021 trade at a median 59% discount, the report said.

On the fundraising side, U.S. venture firms have raised $108.5 billion across 699 funds so far this year, topping 2025’s full-year haul by almost 39%. Megafunds of $500 million or more took 78% of that capital while making up just 6% of new funds. Andreessen Horowitz alone closed funds worth $23.8 billion.

At the other end of the market, just 211 emerging firms have closed a fund this year, compared with 927 in 2022, and first-time funds have raised only $4.9 billion across 81 vehicles. Bobby Franklin, president and chief executive of the National Venture Capital Association, said the strength of AI innovation “can obscure growing challenges within the fundraising market.” Firms like these, along with midsize managers, are often among the first to spot new entrepreneurs and technologies, he said, and the country’s innovation lead depends on keeping “a broad and competitive investor base.”

“This year’s numbers will look like a boom at the top line,” Tarhuni said. “But for most of the market, the liquidity won’t show up, and that will have a large impact going into 2027.”

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Models & LabsUnited States

OpenAI starts GPT-6 rollout in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI

Credited to Tech in Asia · techinasia.com9h ago

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Models & Labs · United States

With GPT-6, ChatGPT’s responses are much more visually appealing and interactive

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · 12h ago

Photograph · SiliconANGLE

OpenAI Group PBC says ChatGPT is moving away from its traditional wall-of-text responses and giving users a more interactive user interface to play with.

In a media briefing today, the company said its GPT-6 models will now be able to access an “Intelligent UI” that will allow the chatbot to generate more visual outputs when it deems necessary, replacing words with graphics, tappable buttons, forms and charts” that will provide a much more interactive experience.

ChatGPT will determine for itself when an answer needs a more visually appealing response and interactive elements for the user to explore a topic more deeply. In such instances, the model will integrate these directly with its response.

In an example, OpenAI showed someone asking ChatGPT how to piece together a seven-speed bicycle. Rather than just churning out endless text that explains everything, it instead generated a complete design breakdown, complete with visualizations of each of the main parts and a clickable button that allows readers to learn more about each of them.

In a second example, a user asked ChatGPT to create a plan for a lamb roast with pictures of each dish, plus a recipe that allowed the user to alter the number of guests in order to recalculate the amount of ingredients required.

OpenAI explained that ChatGPT will generate these visualizations from a library of components that the GPT-6 models were pretrained on. For more basic prompts and questions, the chatbot will stick with the old text-only format, but users will have the option to request a more interactive response at any time, and it will reformat the response accordingly.

The goal with this update is to make “learning complex topics easier,” OpenAI Product Manager Aarush Selvan said in the briefing. The intelligence UI may also help to make ChatGPT more accessible and increase its appeal, though Selvan didn’t say this directly.

ChatGPT has predominantly been a text-based interface,” Selvan said. But the company wants to help people get things done, and it believes that “from the everyday things like planning a recipe or a trip or even trying to learn something, the most helpful answers aren’t just text.”

The visual UI is primarily designed to make ChatGPT easier for people to use and retain information, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research told SiliconANGLE. “We’ve long known that usability is one of the primary factors driving adoption of software, and the text-only interface doesn’t really help when people when it comes to information absorption or processing,” the analyst said.

Mueller believes that this is such a significant move by OpenAI that it could signal the opening of a new front in the battle of the AI assistants, especially if Anthropic responds with a similar visual aesthetic in Claude. “Anthropic will be under pressure to respond to this in the next few weeks, or it could even do so in just a few days if something similar was already in the works,” he said. “This could lead to usability and not just the quality of the model and its answers becoming the deciding factor in which chatbots people want to use. If Anthropic fails to respond to this, OpenAI has a very strong differentiator that would likely change many people’s choices once they see it.”

That is assuming that the Intelligent UI works as well as advertised, of course. It’s worth noting that it’s not an entirely original idea. In fact, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Google LLC’s “Generative Interface,” which was introduced with the launch of Gemini 3 last year, although it seems to be a bit more colorful and more graphics-heavy. When Google introduced that feature, there was a lot of excitement around it, but it doesn’t really appear to have differentiated Gemini as a chatbot all that much.

There may be other considerations, too. OpenAI didn’t say if the Intelligent UI would mean higher token consumption, but that does appear to be the case with all of those extra elements being generated, so that’s something users might want to watch out for. It’s also not clear how susceptible these visual elements may be to the problem that plagues every AI chatbot, namely hallucinations.

OpenAI, however, seems to be pushing for AI to become more visually appealing. Earlier this week, the company revealed it would soon introduce the first image-based ads in ChatGPT’s responses. More cynical users might think that the Intelligent UI may make it more difficult to see which responses are ads and which are the chatbots own. Regardless, ads are almost certainly going to become a part of every AI chatbot at some point.

OpenAI said the Intelligent UI is being made available from today for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers, though in the latter case, the workplace administrator will need to enable it. Free users and Go subscribers will get access to it tomorrow.