On Monday, OpenAI announced it had secured $40 billion in fresh financing, which values the company behind ChatGPT at an impressive $300 billion. This marks the largest fundraising effort ever undertaken by a startup.
The injection of funds occurs through a collaboration with the prominent Japanese investment firm SoftBank Group, allowing the company to advance AI research boundaries even more, as stated in a blog post on their website from the San-Francisco based organization.
The firm stated, "Their backing will assist us in continuing to develop AI systems that promote scientific advancement, facilitate tailored learning experiences, boost human innovation, and lead towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that serves the entire human race."
AGI stands for a computational system possessing intellect comparable to that of a human being.
The company plans to scale its infrastructure and "deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week."
Opening up?
The announcement regarding the funding arrived on the same day that OpenAI revealed they were developing a more accessible generative AI model amid increasing rivalry in the open-source sector from their Chinese competitor DeepSeek and Meta.
This change would signify a significant pivot for OpenAI, as they have up till now strongly advocated for maintaining closed, exclusive models that prevent developers from altering the core technology to better align with their objectives.
OpenAI and supporters of proprietary models — including Google — frequently criticize open models as being riskier and more susceptible to exploitation for harmful purposes by bad actors or foreign governments outside the US.
OpenAI’s adoption of proprietary models has sparked controversy in its conflicts with previous investor Elon Musk, the globe’s richest individual, who has urged OpenAI to adhere to the principles implied by its name and “go back to being an open-source, safety-oriented positive influence as it used to be.”
Putting pressure on OpenAI, many large companies and governments have proved reluctant to build their AI products or services on models they have no control over, especially when data security is a concern.
The primary advantage of Meta's series of Llama models or DeepSeek's offerings lies in alleviating these concerns by enabling businesses to download the models, thereby providing them with much more flexibility to adapt the technology according to their specific needs and maintain ownership over their data.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this month that Llama hit one billion downloads, while the release of DeepSeek's lower-cost R1 model in January rocked the world of artificial intelligence.
"For quite some time, we have been contemplating this idea; however, other pressing commitments held greater importance then. But now, it seems crucial to proceed with the plan," stated CEO Sam Altman of OpenAI regarding their choice to develop a more accessible model during an interview on X.
OpenAI has been riding on the success of its latest image-generation features in ChatGPT, the world-leading AI app and chatbot.
Altman posted on Monday that the tool helped add "one million users" in one hour.
That claim came days after Altman said the new image features were so popular that they were melting the OpenAI graphics processing units that power the AI due to heavy use.
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