OpenAI announced on Monday that it has raised $40 billion in a new funding round, valuing the company at $300 billion.
This marks the largest capital-raising session ever for a startup. The funding comes through a partnership with Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group, which will help OpenAI further push the boundaries of AI research.
In a statement on its website, OpenAI explained that the investment will support its mission to build AI systems that advance scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and move closer to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity. AGI refers to a computing system with human-level intelligence.
SoftBank emphasized that its investment aligns with its mission to realize Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which would surpass human intelligence, and noted that OpenAI is the closest partner to achieving that goal. “The advancement of OpenAI’s AI models is key to achieving AGI and ASI, and massive computing power is essential,” SoftBank stated in its release.
SoftBank will initially invest $10 billion in OpenAI, with the potential for an additional $30 billion by the end of the year, subject to certain conditions.
OpenAI plans to use the funds to scale its infrastructure and provide increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT each week.
