OpenAI valued at $300 billion after record-breaking funding round
The latest funding round has been led by Japanese investment group SoftBank, who will initially provide S10 billion in funding and then $30 billion more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met.
In a blog post on its website, OpenAI said the investment "enables [it] to push the frontiers of AI [artificial intelligence] research even further" and would be used to scale its compute infrastructure and develop "increasingly powerful tools" for ChatGPT users.
The company said 500 million people were now using ChatGPT every week.
"We're excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group - few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do," OpenAI said.
"Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI [artificial general intelligence] that benefits all of humanity." The current AI boom was sparked by OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late2022, beginning a technological arms race among tech firms to introduce generative AI tools within their products and directly to consumers.
Since then, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all moved into the generative AI space with their own dedicated tools.
OpenAI, founded as a non-profit looking to develop open source AI models, has also begun the process of restructuring itself as a for-profit company, a move which has led to a bitter stand-off, and several legal challenges from Elon Musk, who leads rival start-up xAI and was a co-founder at OpenAI before departing the firm in 2018.
Musk has called for OpenAI to return to its open source roots, rather than the closed models it has so far rolled out.
Open source models can be downloaded and modified by firms to suit their needs, but OpenAI and others have previously suggested that this approach carries more risk and leaves powerful technology open to nefarious use by bad actors.
But on Monday, OpenAI also announced it was building a more open generative AI model, as competition in the AI space intensifies, with open source models from Meta and Chinese firm DeepSeek becoming increasingly popular. — dpa
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