They already know that some of these upcoming model builds are going to require $100MM and possibly even a billion dollars. That is just the compute costs for

They already know that some of these upcoming model builds are going to require $100MM and possibly even a billion dollars. That is just the compute costs for building a single model. Product-market fit is basically established and the cost structure is basically understood so he needs the money for pretty straighforward reasons. With that said it's a gamble since somebody might come along with a $10MM model based on some new technique and then OpenAI's cost structure becomes a problem. Presumably their scientists could adapt pretty quickly though if that happened.