OpenAI has raised a monumental $40 billion in a funding round, marking the largest capital infusion ever for a startup. This new investment, which values the company at $300 billion, is spearheaded by a strategic partnership with Japan’s SoftBank Group, enabling OpenAI to accelerate its cutting-edge AI research and development.

According to OpenAI’s announcement, the funding will further its mission of advancing artificial intelligence across various sectors, including scientific discovery, personalised education, and enhancing human creativity. The long-term goal is to move towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a computing platform capable of human-like intelligence.

SoftBank, in its release, expressed confidence that OpenAI is the closest to achieving AGI and even Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), a level of intelligence surpassing human capability. SoftBank’s initial investment of $10 billion is expected to be followed by another $30 billion by the end of this year, subject to certain conditions.

This funding will allow OpenAI to expand its infrastructure, ensuring it continues to provide more advanced AI tools to its growing user base of 500 million weekly ChatGPT users.

On the same day, OpenAI unveiled plans to develop a more open generative AI model, responding to increasing competition from rivals like Meta and the Chinese company DeepSeek. This move represents a shift from OpenAI’s previous stance of keeping its models proprietary, allowing developers limited access to modify the technology.

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While OpenAI had long defended closed models for security and safety reasons, the decision to build a more open AI model addresses growing concerns from large corporations and governments about the control over AI technology and data security. Meta’s Llama models and DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 models, which offer users more control over modifications and data, have gained traction in the industry.

Meta’s Llama models recently hit one billion downloads, while DeepSeek’s R1 model has become a major player in the AI landscape. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the shift toward more open models, stating that the decision had been a long time coming and was now essential to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving AI space.

In addition to this strategic move, OpenAI continues to make waves with its image-generation feature in ChatGPT, which gained an explosive one million new users within an hour of its launch. Altman shared that the popularity of the feature had caused technical strains on the company’s graphic processing units due to heavy usage.

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