OpenAI completes a new round of financing, the valuation has reached 29 billion US dollars
Thanks to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI is one of the most sought-after startups out there, with many investors looking to become shareholders in the company.
According to documents reported by TechCrunch this Friday, some well-known venture capital firms such as Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global have purchased new shares of OpenAI. It is reported that Founders Fund also participated in the investment. Together, these venture capital firms have invested more than $300 million, valuing OpenAI at between $27 billion and $29 billion. The new funding round is unrelated to the $10 billion Microsoft announced earlier this year, a person familiar with the matter said.
If the report is true, it's the latest update on what the Wall Street Journal reported in January about capital operations. Interest in OpenAI has grown rapidly since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November last year. As a big financier with billions of dollars in investment, Microsoft's investment in OpenAI has strong strategic significance. The tech giant is working to integrate OpenAI's technology into multiple areas of its business and challenge Google in search. In contrast, the goal of venture capital firms is more biased towards profit. It is understood that the list of conditions for this round of financing has been signed and the funds have been allocated. The next step is the countersigning of OpenAI. People plan to announce the investment next week. Outside investors now own more than 30 percent of OpenAI, the sources said.
According to PitchBook data, Peter Thiel seems to have become a follower, and Founders Fund seems to be the first investment company to enter the OpenAI field. K2 Global is a company with only one partner, Ozi Amanat, and Thrive is an early supporter of OpenAI. Sequoia Capital, A16Z, and Tiger Global appear to be early investors in OpenAI, judging by PitchBook data. Last year, the financial crisis hit the technology industry, and many companies, including the likes of Tiger and Sequoia, took some hits. In general, many venture capital firms have significantly slowed their investment pace, tightening their pockets and waiting for a better environment and technological breakthroughs. So, at a time when investors are looking for interesting AI startups to back, OpenAI is seen as an opportunity that looks good right now. In support of OpenAI's decision, one source said: "They're probably trying to use this [funding] to say, hey, look, we've unearthed a treasure." Anything is possible in the venture capital world, the source said. Happening, at any time no one cares about the direction may suddenly become popular. OpenAI has a cross-disciplinary technical team, but the area that has received wide attention recently is GPT, the abbreviation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI's large language model family and provides APIs for third parties. The most concerned is ChatGPT, which is a GPT-based generative natural language AI service launched by OpenAI at the end of November 2022, which allows anyone to enter a question and get a convincing and detailed answer. ChatGPT has been setting records, with the site surpassing 1 billion visitors in February, according to SimilarWeb, not counting those who use the technology through third parties.
Generative artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, but OpenAI's new offerings have also brought controversy. ChatGPT is a popular product for consumers, but there are concerns about whether the large model will "hallucinate", whether it is harmful, and how to protect private content and prevent malicious manipulation. In addition, as more and more people pour into AI development, the long-term "open" nature of OpenAI's GPT brand has also begun to be discussed. OpenAI also has a cautious attitude towards new technologies. Before the launch of ChatGPT, a large number of artificial annotations were carried out on the algorithm, and said that more efforts are still needed to develop this service. In February, the company launched a paid version of ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It also upgraded its kernel to GPT-4, a multimodal large language model, in March. Beyond the technology, there is a rapidly growing ecosystem emerging around the technology. Hundreds of businesses large and small have already begun deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services, which is prompting other big tech companies to accelerate their own efforts in generative AI, with Google launching Bard and Meta launching LLaMA and opening it up, the tech scene has been buzzing more than ever lately. However, as the benchmark for new technology in large language models, OpenAI has undeniable appeal over the competition, not least because of its focus on the field of artificial intelligence since its founding in 2015. Despite some significant changes, including transitioning from its original nonprofit model, OpenAI's focus on artificial intelligence hasn't changed. "We've been working on this for a long time, and people are increasingly convinced that it's really going to work," OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said at an AI conference earlier this month. Seven years old, these things take a long time. In general, if you ask why OpenAI is successful and others are not, the answer should be: We have been working on every detail for a long time, and most people unwilling to do so.”
In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI also has an AI-based image generation tool Dall-E, which underwent a major update last July. There is also Whisper AI, a speech recognition model. Copilot, an intelligent code assistant proposed by OpenAI and Microsoft on GitHub, has also been welcomed by developers. Meta is reportedly trying to introduce the technology. Microsoft is the biggest supporter of OpenAI's achievements so far, and its support includes integrating OpenAI's API with its Azure infrastructure to support the model's computing needs. Microsoft also announced the enhanced version of Bing search supported by GPT-4 in March this year, which marks that the AI model is changing the way people interact with the Internet, which may be the opening of the next important chapter in the field of technology.
Reference content:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/28/openai-funding-valuation-chatgpt/
