DatawhaleShare
Latest: Technological Developments, Editorial: Heart of the Machine
Because of the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has become the hottest startup company at present, and many investors hope to join the ranks of glorious shareholders.
Venture capital firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global bought new shares in OpenAI, according to documents seen by TechCrunch on Friday. Founders Fund also invested, the sources said.
In total, more than $300 million has been invested in venture capital, valuing the company at $27 billion to $29 billion. A person familiar with the development said the new funding round is not related to the $10 billion funding Microsoft announced earlier this year.
If accurate, this is the final version of the capital operation reported by The Wall Street Journal in January. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late November, interest in OpenAI and its business has exploded like a virus .
As a big financier of tens of billions of dollars, Microsoft's investment has a strong strategic perspective: the technology giant is working hard to integrate OpenAI's technology into multiple areas of its business and challenge Google in search. On the other hand, When venture capital institutions enter the market as financial supporters, they tend to make profits.
It is understood that the term sheet for this round of financing has been signed, the funds have been allocated, and the upcoming countersign from OpenAI. The investment is planned to be made public next week.
Outside investors now collectively hold more than 30 percent of OpenAI, the sources said.
According to PitchBook data, Peter Thiel seems to have become a follower, Founders Fund seems to be entering the game for the first time, K2 Global is a company with only one partner Ozi Amanat, and Thrive is also an initial supporter of OpenAI. Sequoia Capital, A16Z and Tiger Global appear to be early investors in the company, judging by PitchBook data.
Many companies, including Tiger and Sequoia, have taken some hits due to the financial crisis that spread to the technology industry last year. In general, many venture capital firms have significantly slowed down their investment pace, tightening their pockets and waiting for more investment. A good environment and an outlet for 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.
"They're probably trying to use that (funding) to say, hey, look, we've unearthed a treasure," one source said of the decision to back OpenAI at this point. “Venture capital is a very strange place where anything can happen. At any time, a direction that no one cares about can suddenly become popular.”
OpenAI has a cross-disciplinary technical team, but the area that has attracted widespread attention recently is GPT, the abbreviation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI's large language model family and is also used by third parties to use the API.
The one that has attracted the most attention is naturally ChatGPT, which is a GPT-based generative natural language AI service released by OpenAI at the end of November 2022. It allows anyone to enter a question and get a convincing and detailed answer. SimilarWeb says ChatGPT has been setting records, with more than 1 billion visitors to its site in February -- and that doesn't include those who use the technology through third parties.
Generative artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, but OpenAI's new offerings have also created controversy, with many focusing on the popular ChatGPT product for consumers. As a routine application, people will inevitably question whether the large model has "illusions", whether it is harmful, how it protects private content, whether it will be maliciously manipulated, or unintentionally create rumors. Even the long-term "open" nature of OpenAI's GPT brand is starting to be discussed as more and more people pour into AI development.
OpenAI also has a cautious attitude towards new technologies. Before the launch of ChatGPT, it conducted a large number of manual annotations on the algorithm. It has also acknowledged the work that needs to be done, and continues to develop services and iterations. In February, the startup launched a paid version of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It also upgraded its kernel to GPT-4, a multimodal large language model, in March.
Key to what people can expect for the future, OpenAI's valuation, and what investors might be interested in is that, in addition to the technology, there is a rapidly growing ecosystem emerging around it.
In addition to the hundreds of millions of people who have played ChatGPT, hundreds of businesses, large and small, have started deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services. This is prompting other big tech companies to accelerate their own efforts at generative artificial intelligence. Google launched Bard, Meta launched LLaMA and opened it up, and the tech space has been buzzing more than ever in recent times.
Yet as the benchmark for new technology in large language models, OpenAI has undeniable appeal over the competition, not least because of its focus on artificial intelligence since its founding in 2015. Even as it has undergone some major changes -- including switching from its original nonprofit model. The jury is still out on whether artificial intelligence will spark a new industrial revolution, but as people say: OpenAI may be the closest thing to a winner in this field right now.
"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. “The company has been around for seven years, and these things take a long time. In general, if you ask why OpenAI has succeeded and others have not, the answer should be: We have been working hard on every detail for a long time, and most Nobody wants to do that. ”
In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI also has the AI-based image generation tool Dall-E, which underwent a major update last July, and the speech recognition model Whisper AI. Copilot, an intelligent code assistant proposed by OpenAI and Microsoft on GitHub, has been welcomed by developers, and it was recently reported that Meta is trying to introduce this technology.
Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest backer to date, with efforts including integrating OpenAI's API with its Azure infrastructure to support the model's computational needs. Microsoft also announced an enhanced version of Bing Search powered by GPT-4 in March this year. The AI model is rewriting the way people interact with the Internet . This may be the opening of the next important chapter in the field of technology.
Reference content:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/openai-closes-10-bln-funding-round-27-bln-29-bln-valuation-techcrunch-2023-04-28/
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/28/openai-funding-valuation-chatgpt/
Technology development, like three times ↓