OpenAI stated Wednesday it has raised $6.6 billion in enterprise capital investments as a part of a broader shift by the ChatGPT maker away from its nonprofit roots.
Led by enterprise capital agency Thrive Capital, the funding spherical was backed by tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and SoftBank, in line with a supply conversant in the funding who was not licensed to talk about it publicly.
The funding represents one of many largest fundraising rounds in U.S. historical past, and ranks as the most important previously 17 years that doesn’t embody cash coming from a single deep-pocketed firm, in line with PitchBook, which tracks enterprise capital investments.
Microsoft pumped up OpenAI final yr with a $10 billion funding in change for a big stake within the firm’s future development, mirroring a technique that tobacco large Altria Group deployed in 2018 when it invested $12.8 billion into the now-beleaguered vaping startup Juul.
OpenAI stated the brand new funding “will enable us to double down on our management in frontier AI analysis, enhance compute capability, and proceed constructing instruments that assist individuals resolve onerous issues.” The corporate stated the funding offers it a market worth of $157 billion and can “speed up progress on our mission.”
The inflow of cash comes as OpenAI has been seeking to extra absolutely convert itself from a nonprofit analysis institute right into a for-profit company accountable to shareholders.
Whereas San Francisco-based OpenAI already has a quickly rising for-profit division, the place most of its employees works, it’s managed by a nonprofit board of administrators whose mission is to assist humanity by safely constructing futuristic types of synthetic intelligence that may carry out duties higher than people.
That units sure limits on how a lot revenue it makes and the way a lot shareholders get in return for pricey investments into the computing energy, specialised AI chips and laptop scientists it takes to construct generative AI instruments. However the governance construction would change if the board follows via with a plan to transform itself to a public-benefit company, which is a sort of company entity that’s supposed to assist society in addition to flip a revenue.
Together with Thrive Capital, the funding backers embody Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Constancy Administration and Analysis Firm, MGX, ARK Make investments and Tiger International Administration.
Not included within the spherical is Apple, regardless of hypothesis it’d take a stronger curiosity in OpenAI’s future after not too long ago teaming up with the corporate to combine ChatGPT into its merchandise.
Brendan Burke, an analyst for PitchBook, stated that whereas OpenAI’s present shut partnership with Microsoft has given it broad entry to computing energy, it nonetheless “wants follow-on funding to broaden mannequin coaching efforts and construct proprietary merchandise.”
Burke stated it’ll additionally assist it sustain with rivals reminiscent of Elon Musk’s startup xAI, which not too long ago raised $6 billion and has been working to construct customized knowledge facilities reminiscent of one in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk, who helped bankroll OpenAI’s early years as a nonprofit, has turn out to be a pointy critic of the corporate’s commercialization.
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Related Press writers Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
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