OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company based in San Francisco, California, United States. It was founded in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.
OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.
Key Products
OpenAI has developed several key products, most notably is of course ChatGPT, which became the fastest growing app of all time, reaching 100M+ users in under two months.
As the Guardian highlights, analysts at investment bank UBS said the rate of growth was unprecedented for a consumer app. They wrote in a note that,
In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app.
By comparison, it took TikTok about nine months after its global launch to reach 100 million users and Instagram more than two years, according to data from Sensor Tower, an app analysis firm.
Aside from ChatGPT, other notable OpenAI products include their API that provides access to models such as GPT-3, GPT 3.5 Turbo, GPT-4, fine tuning, and more. They also have a leading text-to-image generator DALL-E, which will be releasing their latest model DALL-E 3 shortly.
OpenAI Funding
OpenAI has raised a over $12B+ in funding, with their latest fundraise being a $300M venture round in April 2023.
OpenAI & Microsoft Partship
Microsoft has been one of the major investors in OpenAI. In fact, Microsoft and OpenAI have been partners since 2019, when Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI.
On January, 2023, Microsoft announced that they would be investing an additional multiyear, $10 billion dollar investment in OpenAI to accelerate AI breakthroughs and ensure that these benefits are broadly shared with the world.
As Microsoft highlights, this investment is part of the third phase of their long-term partnership with OpenAI. The agreement enables each company to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies while jointly developing new supercomputer technologies for AI for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft will also be OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, which just for ChatGPT is reported to cost $700k per day...so as you can imagine this is a big deal. As part of this investment, Microsoft will get a 75% share of OpenAI’s profits until it makes back the money on its investment. After that, the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI.
