The company signaled it would need the green light from California and Delaware policymakers as part of the restructuring plan. Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with its largest investor, Microsoft, to restructure its business. In a Thursday notice, OpenAI said the move, first proposed in May, would allow its for-profit arm to transition to a public benefit corporation, while the nonprofit would maintain control of the company. Under the deal, the nonprofit arm will have a stake worth more than $100 billion in the public benefit corporation.
OpenAI’s latest funding round, which values the company at $300 billion, was five times oversubscribed amid surging investor demand for AI, according to The New York Times. OpenAI has raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation, accelerating its plan to secure $40 billion in funding by year’s end. The latest round, led by Dragoneer Investment Group, comes after the company raised $2.5 billion in March. According to The New York Times on Friday, Dragoneer committed $2.8 billion to the raise, representing roughly 10% of its total funds. The funding round brings OpenAI closer to its 2025 target, which includes a $30 billion commitment from SoftBank. The funding round was five times oversubscribed, meaning investors wanted to invest roughly $40 billion, the Times said. OpenAI prioritized n…
OpenAI expands Stargate with Oracle to surpass 5 GW of AI power, while Elon Musk outlines plans for xAI to deploy 50 million H100-scale units in 5 years. OpenAI announced a 4.5 gigawatt (GW) expansion in partnership with Oracle to power future AI development. The deal, part of OpenAI’s long-term vision to deploy 10 gigawatts of compute capacity across the US, will add to its existing Stargate I facility in Abilene, Texas, and push the project beyond its original commitment made at the White House in January, the firm said on Tuesday. “This is a gigantic infrastructure project,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X, sharing images of the Abilene site. In an earlier post, he confirmed that over one million GPUs will be online by year-end, and joked, “Now they better get to work figuring out how…
Robinhood’s OpenAI and SpaceX tokens are controversial, but the fine print indicates that they offer indirect exposure to these companies through derivatives. Robinhood’s stock token offerings are under regulatory scrutiny in the European Union after OpenAI warned investors that the digital brokerage’s so-called OpenAI tokens do not represent any equity stake in the company. OpenAI’s warning prompted an inquiry by Lithuania’s central bank, which serves as Robinhood’s primary regulator in the region. The Bank of Lithuania is “awaiting clarifications” regarding Robinhood’s stock token offerings linked to OpenAI and SpaceX, CNBC reported on Monday, citing Giedrius Šniukas, a spokesperson for the Bank of Lithuania.
The platform's OpenAI private equity tokens were disavowed by the company, prompting OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk, to call the AI firm "fake." OpenAI issued a statement on Wednesday clarifying that OpenAI tokens distributed to European Union users by the trading platform Robinhood do not represent equity in the company. "We are not involved in this and do not endorse it,” representatives of the company wrote on social media. “Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer. Please be careful." Robinhood distributed $5 worth of OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to clients in the EU region on Monday as part of the company's push into tokenized stock trading, which included launching a layer-2 blockchain network to settle tokenized equity trades.
Meta's latest AI hire follows several developments and partnerships aimed at making the tech giant a leader in the burgeoning sector. Tech company Meta has hired Trapit Bansal, a former key researcher at artificial intelligence company OpenAI, who was central to developing the firm's o1 reasoning AI model. Bansal is the latest ex-OpenAI researcher to join the Meta team, following the addition of Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, according to TechCrunch. The hires are part of Meta's push to expand its AI operations and overhaul the capabilities of its reasoning models by training its AI on real-world scenarios to cultivate intelligence. Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun previously said:
OpenAI is dropping Scale AI from its data labeling suppliers days after the startup’s acquisition by Meta. OpenAI is scaling back its contracts with Scale AI, a data labeling startup recently acquired by social media giant Meta. According to a Thursday report from Bloomberg, the ChatGPT maker is winding down its reliance on the startup's data, a few days after Meta announced a $14.8 billion deal for a 49% ownership stake in Scale AI. The acquisition was Meta’s second-largest and will also have Scale CEO Alexandr Wang joining Meta’s experimental AI project. The companies announced the deal on June 12.
Sam Altman didn’t specify how the new devices would operate or what they would look like. OpenAI is planning to develop AI “companion” devices that will integrate artificial intelligence capabilities with everyday life, potentially opening the door to a new high-tech innovation used alongside laptops and smartphones. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he and designer Jony Ive are developing these secret devices for mass consumption, with plans to ship 100 million units upon launch. Ives joined OpenAI after his startup, io, was acquired by Altman’s company in a $6.5 billion deal, the Journal reported on May 21.
OpenAI’s doomsday bunker plan, the “potential benefits” of propaganda bots, plus the best fake books you can’t read this summer. AI Eye.. In the last AI Eye, we reported that scientists from the four leading AI companies believe theres at least a 10% chance of AI killing around 50% of humanity in the next decade one scientist was buying farmland in the US Midwest so he could ride out the AI apocalypse. This week, it emerged that another doomsday prepper is OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. According to Empire of AI author Karen Hao, he told key scientists in mid-2023 that “we’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI.” Artificial General Intelligence is the vaguely defined idea for a sentient intelligence smarter than humans. The underground compound would protect the sc…
News of the deal follows restructuring plans from OpenAI to focus on a public benefit corporation controlled by a non-profit organization. Tech company Microsoft and artificial intelligence firm OpenAI are reportedly in talks to renegotiate the investment deal between the AI firm and Microsoft, which is OpenAI's biggest financial backer. According to a report from the Financial Times, Microsoft may give up a portion of its equity in OpenAI for continued access to the AI company's products and models beyond 2030, when some of the original terms of a deal signed between the two companies expire. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, when it first acquired an interest in the artificial intelligence firm.
