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OpenAI, the research laboratory responsible for creating ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, has completed a share sale worth over $300 million, according to reports. According to the documents, the lab is now valued at somewhere between $27 billion and $29 billion. Venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital , Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and K2 Global reportedly acquired new shares.
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Back in January, OpenAI revealed that it had received investment from Microsoft. While the exact financial details of the agreement were not disclosed by either company, sources claimed that Microsoft had invested $10 billion in the startup. Prior to this, Microsoft had already provided over $3 billion in funding to OpenAI.
ChatGPT, a generative AI system that uses online data to mimic human work and generate content, has gained significant attention in the tech world and beyond. It was founded in 2015 by entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Ilya Sutskever.
OpenAI was initially founded as a non-profit organization but was later transformed into a for-profit company by Sam Altman, after Elon Musk’s departure in 2018, to fund research. OpenAI recently launched its most powerful chatbot, GPT-4, which was praised by Altman for being highly capable and aligned. However, four AI experts raised concerns about the technology shortly after its launch, calling for an urgent pause in research.
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The Future of Life Institute, funded by Elon Musk, has published an open letter urging a six-month pause in the development of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4. Civil society groups have raised similar concerns and called for regulations on AI development. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has prompted other tech giants to develop similar language models and has led companies to integrate generative AI into their products.
