ChatGPT developer OpenAI allegedly obtains $300 million financing

OpenAI, the research lab behind ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, has finalized over $300 million share sale at a value between $27 billion and $29 billion, as per a report. Venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global, have scooped up fresh shares, TechCrunch said, citing official papers.

OpenAI had in January revealed that it had acquired money from Microsoft. Both firms did not reveal the particular financial parameters of the acquisition, although media sources suggested Microsoft spent $10 billion in the company. Microsoft has previously spent more than $3 billion on OpenAI.

Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, which employ enormous pools of internet data like digital books, blog posts and other media to produce text, graphics and other material emulating human labour, have generated a buzz in the tech industry 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 formed the lab as a nonprofit entity. But when Musk departed the business in 2018, Altman reorganized OpenAI as a for-profit corporation so that it could raise the money required for its research.

OpenAI last month introduced GPT-4, the most powerful version of their extremely popular chatbot ChatGPT. Altman, OpenAI’s CRO, said GPT-4 is the most competent and aligned model from the firm yet.

Soon after the introduction, four artificial intelligence scientists voiced concerns and advocated for an urgent suspension in development.

The open letter, published on the website of the Musk-funded Future of Life Institute, recommended a six-month circuit-breaker in the creation of systems "more powerful" than Microsoft-backed OpenAI's latest GPT-4.

Civil society organizations throughout the globe have likewise identified similar risks and asked governments to restrict the development of artificial intelligence.

Since its release last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT has pushed competitors, including tech titans like Microsoft and Google, to expedite the creation of comparable massive language models, and firms to incorporate generative AI models into their products.