The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that Apple and Nvidia are in talks to invest in OpenAI as part of a new deal that would value the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up at $100-billion (all figures U.S.). A New York Times dispatch to The Globe says that the deal would be led by Thrive Capital and might also include Microsoft. Thrive would put about $1-billion into OpenAI. A $100-billion valuation would be a $20-billion increase from OpenAI's valuation eight months ago. OpenAI started the AI boom with the release of on-line chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022. In the months that followed, investors pumped tens of billions of dollars into the start-up and other companies that were developing similar technologies. In recent months, investors' interest has cooled as several prominent start-ups essentially disappeared into tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. OpenAI, however, has remained an independent operation intent on building and selling its own technologies and products. Since 2019, Microsoft and others have invested more than $13-billion in the start-up, which needs billions of dollars in raw computing power to build its AI technologies. Nvidia supplies much of that computing power.