OpenAI, the company behind the popular conversational AI model ChatGPT, has recently attracted new investors, according to TechCrunch.
Venture capital firms such as Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, and K2 Global have acquired new shares, with documents showing that they have invested over $300 million at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion. A separate investment from Microsoft, believed to be around $10 billion, was also confirmed. The funds from venture capital firms are expected to be used for financial backing, while Microsoft’s investment is more strategic, focusing on integrating OpenAI’s technology into its business.
OpenAI’s GPT, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, and ChatGPT, a generative AI service, have attracted significant attention lately. ChatGPT, which provides detailed answers to natural language questions, reportedly received over 1 billion visitors to its website in February. However, the company has faced controversies related to ChatGPT’s capabilities and ethical concerns.
Despite these challenges, OpenAI continues to develop services and iterate, introducing a paid version of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Plus in February, and upgrading to the multimodal LLM GPT-4 in March.
