Now that OpenAI is becoming a for-profit company, it’s making a tidy profit in the process. reported that OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in new funding from investors, nearly doubling its value to $157 billion. The new funding also makes it the largest venture capital deal in history.
The new investors jumped on board after the artificial intelligence startup planned to switch from a charitable non-profit to . If OpenAI fails to make the move to for-profit, investors have the right to pull their funding, according to .
The venture-capital firm Thrive Capital founded by Joshua Kushner, the youngest son of convicted-turned-pardoned real estate developer Charles Kushner, led the new round of funding with $1.25 billion. Other investors included SoftBank, Nvidia, Fidelity Management and OpenAI’s previous largest investor Microsoft.
One name that was notably absent from the investor list is Apple. The tech giant was in the process of negotiating a funding deal but apparently .
Funding isn’t the only thing that’s growing for OpenAI. Its AI app ChatGPT has attracted 250 million weekly active users, up from announced at the end of August, and 11 million paying subscribers. The higher usage rate has OpenAI officials thinking they should to $22 a month by the end of the year and $44 a month in the next five years.
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