Despite a wave of executive departures in recent months, OpenAI is prospering today announced an expected latest round of financing.
It was all the time expected to be an enormous sum, but the quantity it raised – $6.6 billion at a complete valuation of the corporate of $157 billion – now makes it the biggest enterprise capital round on this planet thus far, in keeping with sources Story Axios.
According to Thrive Capital, the round was led Bloombergwhile CNBC notes that heavyweights like Nvidia and Microsoft also put extra money into this round.
When announcing the funding on its websiteOpenAI found that ChatGPT alone counts greater than 250 million weekly unique users.
“The latest funding will allow us to double our leadership in groundbreaking AI research, increase computing capability, and proceed to develop tools that help people solve difficult problems,” the corporate wrote in a press release short blog post.
Reasons for skepticism?
However, the news was still met with skepticism by AI critics, including outspoken tech PR expert and tech author Ed Zitronwhose latest newsletter is headlined “OpenAI is bad business” and argues that OpenAI’s decision to take a reported $500 million from the infamous Softbank Venture Fund – which has notably invested in duds like WeWork – combined with its reliance on individual ChatGPT subscriptions quite than API usage or Licensing suggests that OpenAI isn’t well positioned to succeed as a for-profit company in the longer term.
I feel this can be a valid criticism, as is stating that it’s Apple reportedly declined to take a position at the corporate after considering it and possibly within the wake of former Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati's resignation just last week.
And then the report got here from The Financial Times that OpenAI was a part of the conditions of those that threw money at it that they not spend money on competitors like Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI researchers continues to rent more exciting executivesand Musk’s xAI – as recently reported turned on its Memphis training supercluster “Colossus.” with greater than 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs – apparently showing that OpenAI is anxious in regards to the competition catching up.
Musk, for his part, greeted the news of OpenAI's reported exclusive funding terms along with his typically blunt criticism, calling the corporate evil on his X account.
Indeed, competition within the AI ​​space is heating up as more latest models come onto the market, resembling Liquid AI's latest non-transformer-based Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs), and Google and Anthropic also offer compelling options for businesses and consumers to. Meanwhile, Meta and Alibaba release powerful open source models without spending a dime.
The OpenAI bull case
Still, OpenAI's models top the charts relating to third-party performance benchmarks, and each time they've been overtaken, OpenAI has released an update or a complete latest class of models, just like the o1 preview series that reclaims the throne.
Fueled by $6.6 billion in fresh funding and with latest models, developer tools and aggressive cost-cutting measures for developer customers (intelligence that’s “too low cost to measure,” as many within the AI ​​industry say) – or so it appears that evidently OpenAI isn't going anywhere any time soon. That may very well be the case Too big to failas I suspected a number of weeks ago.
For developers constructing products based on the corporate's AI models and frameworks, this is probably going welcome news – as they’re prone to remain stable and supported in the longer term.
Will OpenAI give GPT creators extra money?
However, an enormous query stays regarding OpenAI's custom GPT store, its version of a sort of AI app store that launched in January 2024 and allows any ChatGPT Plus user to create and share custom versions of ChatGPT , designed to meet specific roles and perform specific tasks.
CEO and co-founder of OpenAI said Sam Altman at his developer conference DevDay in late 2023 that there can be a revenue share, and a few users reported receiving some revenue from their GPTs, but we haven't heard much from OpenAI about it since.
Now that I'm flush with money, I'm wondering if OpenAI will start paying out more to more GPT creators (also selfish since I've created a number of custom GPTs – full disclosure). I even have reached out to the corporate to inquire about this and can update after I hear back.
Whatever the case, OpenAI's coffers have been replenished, and despite the chaos behind the scenes, the corporate continues to ship latest AI products often – although we're all still waiting for the discharge of its AI video model Sora.
