New York: OpenAI the research lab behind ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, has closed over $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, as per a report. Venture capital funds, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global, have picked up new shares, TechCrunch reported, citing official documents.
OpenAI had in January announced that it has raised funding from Microsoft. Both companies did not disclose the specific financial terms of the deal, but media reports said Microsoft invested $10 billion in the startup. Microsoft had already invested more than $3 billion in OpenAI.
Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, which use vast pools of online data like digital books, blog posts and other media to generate text, images and other content mimicking human work, have created a buzz in the tech world and beyond.
The startup was founded in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Sam Altman, former president of Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator; Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of electric carmaker Tesla; and Ilya Sutskever, one of the most prominent researchers over the past decade.
They founded the lab as a nonprofit organization. But after Musk left the venture in 2018, Altman remade OpenAI as a for-profit company so that it could raise the money needed for its research.
GPT-4 release
OpenAI last month launched GPT-4, the most powerful version of its hugely popular chatbot ChatGPT. Altman, OpenAI’s CRO, said GPT-4 is the most capable and aligned model from the company yet.
Soon after the launch, four artificial intelligence experts expressed concerns and called for an urgent pause in research.
The open letter, published on the website of the Musk-funded Future of Life Institute, urged a six-month circuit-breaker in the development of systems “more powerful” than Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s new GPT-4.
Civil society groups around the world have also flagged such concerns and pressed lawmakers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence.
Since its release last year, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has prompted rivals, including tech giants like Microsoft and Google, to accelerate the development of similar large language models, and companies to integrate generative AI models into their products.
