OpenAI has closed its latest round of funding, bringing in $6.6 billion as the AI firm continues its march toward becoming a for-profit company.
OpenAI is the world’s leading AI firm but, like all AI firms, the company is burning through money at an alarming rate. The company just concluded its latest round of funding, bringing in $6.6 billion for a total valuation of $157 billion.
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The company announced the news in a blog post.
We’ve raised $6.6B in new funding at a $157B post-money valuation to accelerate progress on our mission. The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems.
We aim to make advanced intelligence a widely accessible resource. We’re grateful to our investors for their trust in us, and we look forward to working with our partners, developers, and the broader community to shape an AI-powered ecosystem and future that benefits everyone. By collaborating with key partners, including the U.S. and allied governments, we can unlock this technology’s full potential.
The company also revealed that it has some 250 million weekly ChatGPT users.
We are making progress on our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Every week, over 250 million people around the world use ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity, and learning. Across industries, businesses are improving productivity and operations, and developers are leveraging our platform to create a new generation of applications. And we’re only getting started.
OpenAI is in the process of transitioning to a for-profit company, abandoning its nonprofit roots. As part of the transition, the company has been looking for ways to better monetize its tech. Although there were rumors that subscription fees as high as $2,000 per month were being floated within the company, the most recent report indicates the company will more than double the cost of ChatGPT Plus in the next five years, bringing the cost of the subscription up to $44.