OpenAI said it had raised $40bn in a funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at $300bn – the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup.
It comes in a partnership with the Japanese investment group SoftBank and “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,” OpenAI announced, adding it would “pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence)” for which “massive computing power is essential”.
SoftBank said it wanted to realise “artificial super intelligence” (ASI) surpassing human intelligence and OpenAI was the partner closest to achieving that goal.
SoftBank is to put $10bn at first into OpenAI and $30bn more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met.
Also on Monday, OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta.
OpenAI previously was a fierce defender of closed, proprietary models that do not allow developers to modify the basic technology to adapt AI to their goals. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” said the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman.
OpenAI and defenders of closed models – which include Google – have often decried open models as riskier and more vulnerable to malicious and non-US government use.
Elon Musk, a former OpenAI investor, has called on OpenAI to “return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was”.
Large companies and governments have proven reluctant to use AI models they have no control over, especially when data security is a concern. Meta and DeepSeek let companies download and modify their models.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said this month that Llama had hit 1 bn downloads. DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 model in January rocked the world of artificial intelligence.
OpenAI has been riding on the success of its latest image-generation features in ChatGPT. Altman claimed the tool helped add “one million users” in one hour and overwhelmed OpenAI’s graphics processing units.
With Agence France-Presse
