US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once said
“people who end up as first don’t actually set out to be first. They set out to do something they love.”This quote resonates with me, every time I set out to look at those that pioneered a trend, a technology, a thought, a movement. Often, the success stories of those in the tech space follow the success of the technology. Open AI’s Sam Altman is living his moment in the sun now, when the firm is heading for a record-breaking funding round after a series of big announcements and expansion.
Slated for a breakthrough funding of $6.5 billion from tech giants such as Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft, the maker of ChatGPT is standing at the cusp of a pivotal moment in the evolution of Artificial Intelligence with a great deal of interest from investors. New York based venture capitalist Thrive Capital is leading this conversation with a $1.25 billion commitment. This funding movement places OpenAI in the unique position of being the pioneer, the shaper, and the hottest pick in the market. It has gifted itself a unique opportunity to handpick its investors and promoters. Considering the overwhelming interest, the startup has now set a minimum contribution of $250 million per backer. If the funding comes through, OpenAI is expected to stand at a valuation of roughly $150 billion. The last big investment in the AI sector was the one that Elon Musk’s xAI received in May this year, worth $6 Billion.
This funding round for Open AI comes right after the release of its new o1 model which is designed to spend more time thinking before it responds. As a technology, o1 can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models which focused on science, coding, and math, claims the startup.
For many similar startups, overcoming the technology integration, the infrastructure and preaching to the possible regulations of AI is a hiccup. So, Open AI seems like the hottest ticket in town; but is it?
Developments and backlashes
After being operational for nearly a decade, the San Francisco based startup is yet to turn profitable. It has also irked content publishers for scraping their content. Players such as The New York Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting and other newspapers which include the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, and The Mercury News, are among others who have filed lawsuits against the AI startup.While its new update o1 is gathering the world’s attention with its problem-solving capabilities, it has launched a new effort called OpenAI Academy that will award developers from low and middle-income countries $1 million in API credits. In an official announcement made by the AI startup, it said that the goal of the program was to ensure that the potential of artificial intelligence was the affording of benefits of AI to the disadvantaged communities globally. The AI firm has also recently funded the translation of the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark into 14 languages including Arabic, Bengali and Swahili to aid non-English speaking communities.
Open AI in India
Only in August this year, Srinivas Narayanan, VP- Open AI spoke at the Global India AI summit and shared the startup’s future plans. He said, “our mission at OpenAI is to build AGI (artificial general intelligence) that is safe and beneficial for all of humanity.”Talking about the growth of the organisation, he added, “in the last decade the entire field has witnessed a huge progress in AI and in the last five years we have seen a huge progress in building generally intelligent modules. Chat GPT was a low-key research project, but in the last 18 months we have seen that people are using it in really transformative ways and it’s impacting people’s daily lives in all sorts of ways that we hadn’t imagined including in India.”
“What this shows is that when we have generally intelligent systems, people are able to put them to use in lots of different applications and providing expertise at scale is one of the important challenges for society. We are seeing AI being used in lots of new industries across the world and here in India as well,” he said.
Bell the cat
Open AI’s next development is aimed at an AI that interacts with the physical world to make decisions for the user- a tech vision that is expected to be a trillion dollar valuation.Like all investors, the ones leading the conversation are in the front row in this startup’s development, but what this really means is that everyone wants a piece of Open AI.
Read more: AI as a public good
