OpenAI Raises Record $110B, Hits 900M Weekly Users
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today on the podcast, we're talking about the latest news from OpenAI, which includes a $110 billion round of funding they just completed, and they have just reached 900 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. We're going to get into all of that, including what their COO has been saying about the rollout of ads into ChatGPT. Before we do, if you want to try the latest from ChatGPT or any other AI model, I'd love for you to check out my startup, which is AIbox.ai. We've just revamped and redesigned the entire platform for the ground up. I'd love for you to check it out. You get access to over 40 of the top AI models, everything from OpenAI to Gemini to Grok to Cohere to Mistral. There's so many different models, a bunch of open source models, tons of amazing image models and 11 labs for audio all in one place for $8.99 a month.
So if you want to get access to all the top models for less than $9, go check out AIbox.ai. There's a link in the description and you get 20% off if you get an annual plan. All right, let's talk about what's going on with OpenAI. So like I mentioned, they've just raised $110 billion in private funding. I mean, basically, this is one of the largest funding rounds in history. The round had $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from Nvidia, and also $30 billion from SoftBank. And then they had a $730 billion pre-money valuation for this. So the entire round is open. They have additional investors that are expected to join in the coming months. It's kind of interesting when you have around this big. Basically, I think they're just saying, look, $730 billion.
This is the valuation. And that might actually creep up for people coming in the future. But I mean, they're basically proving to everyone, look, we can get any amount of money, $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from NVIDIA, $30 billion from SoftBank. And I think what's happening is these are kind of like the anchor players in this round that are going to put in, write the huge checks, and then they're going to have a lot of VCs and other capital allocators come in, kind of top up the full fund. Here's what they said about it. They said, we're entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale. Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand and turn that capacity into products people rely on.
I think a huge part of the money that they've raised is tied to infrastructure partnerships, right? I mean, when you're getting it from Amazon, NVIDIA, and NVIDIA, those two players, I think is going to be a lot of that's going to be CapEx. Just like they've done with some prior rounds, some of the investment is going to come in the form of services and compute credits. So it's not actually just pure cash. but they didn't really disclose what the breakdown is. And I think that that serves a couple different purposes. One, I mean, if they want to get some venture capital dollars in and other people investing sovereign wealth funds, all that kind of stuff, who's going to put actual cash in, I think it makes it look pretty good if they're like, look, we just got $50 billion from Amazon.
Now is 25 billion of that just, you know, credits on AWS, or perhaps, you know, some form of the $30 billion from NVIDIA is just kind of prepayment for the chips that OpenAI is going to directly be purchasing from them. There's a lot of these kind of deals going on where they're not actually directly getting cash, but the headline number is big and it's able to help them raise actual cash from other players. This is all following their March round that they did last year, which they brought in about $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. So jumping from $300 billion to $750 $30 billion is massive. I mean, they're getting close to a trillion dollar valuation here. And going from $40 billion to $110 billion, they're proving that they are capable of raising money.
And this is just the start of the round as well.
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