Japanese tech incubator SoftBank is offering to buy shares from OpenAI employees as it looks to increase its investment in the ChatGPT developer.
It is looking to buy $1.5 billion of shares, CNBC reported on Wednesday, with a tender offer allowing staff a way of selling shares in the privately owned artificial intelligence company.
The tender offer is set to close this week.
SoftBank was allotted $500 million of shares as part of the AI startup's $6.6 billion funding round last month, but reportedly wanted an even larger stake.
Masayoshi Son, founder of the Tokyo-based firm, earlier this year said investing in AI was key for the company.
"I am more energized than ever because I have realized our ultimate mission: the evolution of humanity. This mission will be accomplished through the realization of artificial super intelligence (ASI)—AI that is ten thousand times more intelligent than human wisdom," he said in a message to shareholders in the summer.
While currently tech companies are working to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) to enable autonomous performance of a wide range of learning and problem-solving tasks, he said this "will only be as great as any human genius" and so "will bring no dramatic changes in our way of life or in society’s rules and systems".
But he sees ASI as "completely different", using a network of AGI models "stimulating each other to rapidly accelerate their evolution" realized in about ten years' time.
"The realization of ASI, which will far surpass human wisdom, will mark a turning point in human history. ASI transcends the digital world. One day, ASI-powered smart robots will perform all kinds of physical tasks on our behalf, including manufacturing, transportation, construction, and housework," he said.