A new round of financing has brought in $6.6 billion (€5.97 billion) for the AI company OpenAI. The San Francisco-based US company announced on Wednesday that after the capital increase it would now be valued at 157 billion dollars (142.14 billion euros). The result of the financing round was confirmed by the venture capital company Thrive Capital.
With the financial injection, Sam Altman’s company, founded in 2015, consolidates its place as the global market leader in artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI is now one of the most valuable privately held tech companies in the world, comparable to SpaceX.
The money will allow OpenAI to further expand its “position in AI research, increase computing power, and continue to develop tools that help people solve difficult problems,” the company said in a blog post.
OpenAI became one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups when it released the first version of ChatGPT in 2022, bringing generative AI technology to a broad audience for the first time.
Hardly any other app in the world has been downloaded as quickly as ChatGPT. This gave users a first impression of the power of generative AI, which can generate texts, images and other content in response to simple requests. Since then, the big tech companies have been racing to develop and use new AI programs with high investments.
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