(ORDO NEWS) — The hottest startup in Silicon Valley right now is OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed developer of ChatGPT, a highly publicized chatbot that can write a poem, a college essay, or even a line of code.
Tesla mogul Elon Musk was one of the early investors in OpenAI, and Microsoft is reportedly in talks to increase the initial investment from $1 billion to $10 billion to challenge the world-dominating Google search engine.
If agreed that a cash injection from the Windows maker would value OpenAI at a whopping $29 billion, making it a rare success in the tech world with big players like Amazon, Meta and Twitter cutting costs and laying off staff.
“Microsoft is clearly being aggressive on this front and is not out to get left behind in what could potentially be a game-changer for AI investment,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.
Prior to its release from ChatGPT, OpenAI wowed technical people with Dall-E 2, a program that creates digital images with simple instructions.
Microphone Company rosoft, which makes no secret of its ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence, has integrated Dall-E 2 into several of its applications, and now, according to a Bloomberg report, the tech giant wants to implement ChatGPT into its Bing search engine to compete with Google.
Ever since ChatGPT was introduced in November, the prowess of this chatbot has aroused the curiosity and admiration of Internet users.
He is able to formulate detailed and human-like answers to a wide range of questions. objects in seconds, raising concerns that it is vulnerable to misuse by school scammers or misinformation.
‘Not cheap’
The resounding success is partly due to a smart marketing strategy in which the company has made its research available to non-specialists, said artificial intelligence specialist Robb Wilson, founder of software company OneReach.ai.
“It is one thing to provide this technology to technologists. Suggesting it in the chat UI and allowing non-developers to play with it sparked discussion,” he said.
OpenAI, founded in late 2015, is led by 37-year-old Sam Altman. entrepreneur and former president of startup incubator Y Combinator.
The company has counted on the financial backing of prestigious contributors from the start, including LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman, investor Peter Thiel, and Musk.
The multi-billionaire served on the OpenAI board of directors until 2018, but left to focus on Tesla, the electric vehicle company.
The startup also relies on a team of computer scientists and researchers led by Ilya Sutskever. , a former Google executive specializing in machine learning.
OpenAI, which did not respond to AFP inquiries, had about 200 employees by 2021, according to a request made directly to ChatGPT.
For now, despite the excitement caused by ChatGPT, the company has yet to find a path to financial independence.
Founded As a non-profit organization, the startup turned into a “restricted for-profit company” in 2019 to attract more investors, and this week co-founder Greg Brockman said a paid version of ChatGPT is in the works.
Finding funding seems necessary for a company with exorbitant costs.
In a tweet with Musk in early December, Altman acknowledged that each ChatGPT conversation cost OpenAI a few US cents.
Tom Goldstein, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, estimates that the company spends $100,000 a day on its bot, or about $3 million a month.
Partnering with Microsoft, which provides a startup with its remote computing services, could cut costs, but “it’s not cheap anyway,” Goldstein said.
“Some say it’s wasteful to pour such resources… into a demonstration,” he added.
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