Athira Sethu
Kochi, 1 April 2025
OpenAI has raised $40 billion in fresh funding, catapulting the valuation of the company to $300 billion. It is the highest amount any startup has ever raised. The money was raised from investors led by SoftBank, a large Japanese investment company. OpenAI revealed the funds would assist them in expanding the frontiers of artificial intelligence (AI) research.
The firm clarified that this investment will enable them to keep developing AI systems that are capable of assisting with scientific discovery, personalized learning, and human creativity. They also aspire to get closer to the development of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which is a system with human-level intelligence. SoftBank indicated that it wishes to witness the development of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), a type of AI smarter than humans. They think OpenAI is the ideal partner to make this a reality.
First, SoftBank will put in $10 billion into OpenAI, with another $30 billion to follow by the end of the year, subject to some conditions. This investment will enable OpenAI to scale its infrastructure and enhance its tools for the 500 million users of ChatGPT weekly.
Meanwhile, OpenAI also said that it will build an open AI model. This is significant because OpenAI has been under increasing competition from firms such as DeepSeek and Meta, which are releasing open-source AI models. OpenAI had always maintained that its models should remain closed, i.e., developers would not be able to modify or alter the technology. OpenAI has cited that open models are more dangerous and may be used by malicious actors or non-U.S. governments.
This change to open models is important, as it follows calls from large corporations and governments, who desire greater control over their AI systems for security purposes. Meta and DeepSeek provide models that can be downloaded and edited, providing companies with greater control over their technology and information. Meta’s Llama models, for instance, have been downloaded more than a billion times, and DeepSeek’s R1 model has disrupted the AI world with its affordability.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company had considered doing this for some time, but other things had taken priority. But now it seems like it’s something that needs to be done. OpenAI has also achieved massive success with its image-generating capability in ChatGPT, which drew one million new users in a single hour. Altman said the popularity of the tool had generated some technical glitches, with servers buckling under the pressure.
