For developers building products atop the company’s AI models and frameworks, this is probably welcome news.
Despite a wave of executive departures in recent months, OpenAI has today announced an expected new funding round.
It was always expected to be a whopper, but the amount it raised — $6.6 billion at a $157 billion total company valuation — now makes it the largest venture capital round in history to date, according to Axios.
The round was led by Thrive Capital, according to Bloomberg, while CNBC notes that heavy hitters including Nvidia and Microsoft plowed more cash into this round as well.
In announcing the funding on its website, OpenAI noted that ChatGPT alone counts more than 250 million weekly unique users.
“The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems,” the company wrote in a short blog post.Reasons for skepticism?
However, the news was still greeted with skepticism among AI critics including the outspoken tech public relations expert and tech writer Ed Zitron, who’s latest newsletter is headlined “OpenAI is a 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 rather than API usage or licensing, suggests it is not well positioned to succeed as a for-profit in the future.
These are, in my opinion, fair criticisms, as is noting the fact that Apple reportedly declined to invest in the firm after giving it consideration and potentially in the wake of former chief technology officer Mira Murati’s resignation just last week.
