OpenAI is a research lab responsible for ChatGPT, its internationally renowned artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot. It has just finished selling over $300 million in shares, with a valuations between $27 billion and $29 billion, as reported by TechCrunch. Major venture capital investors, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and K2 Global, have participated in this new share issue.
Already in January, OpenAI had announced an investment from Microsoft, though the exact amount is yet to be disclosed. What is known is that Microsoft has already funded OpenAI to the value of more than $3 billion.
Presently, OpenAI is developing Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, which use vast amounts of data from books and blogs, amongst other sources, to produce text, images and other digital content akin to human production. This has made it quite successful, thus attracting interest from tech giants like Microsoft and Google into producing similar language models.
It started in 2015 and was co-founded by four entrepreneurs, amongst them Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and the renowned Elon Musk, who left the project in 2018. Sam Altman then decided it would switch from a non-profit system to a for-profit model in order to finance its research. OpenAI’s most recently released version of ChatGPT is the GPT-4.
However, the GPT-4 caused quite a bit of concern, leading to an open letter signed by four artificial intelligence researchers to declare a six-month period of moratorium on developing systems that exceed the power of OpenAI. Civil society initiatives have likewise called for regulation in order to keep a handle on the development of artificial intelligence.
