OpenAI Pushes Additional Funding for Artificial General Intelligence

CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is pushing for additional funding toward artificial general intelligence according to an interview with the Financial Times. The goal of this is to create an AI that could match human intelligence, if not surpass it.

Microsoft, a heavy investor in the AI startup, had already put in a hefty investment of $10 billion, with OpenAI looking for even more funding to reach its AGI goals. Speaking of the partnership with the tech giant, Altman said that it was “working really well” and the expectation is to “raise a lot more over time” to help fund the creation of even more sophisticated AI models.

Though the potential of such a breakthrough is vast, one has to ask if Microsoft would be willing to pay such a price. Altman has an optimistic view. He said, “I’d hope so….There’s a long way to go, and a lot of compute to build out between here and AGI . . . training expenses are just huge.”

This comes after a very good revenue year for OpenAI which saw the firm’s revenue enter the billion-dollar range. But the company still hasn’t reached the point of profitability due to the vast costs associated with training models.

This is where the partnership with Microsoft becomes key. Together it would make sure that “that we both make money on each other’s success, and everybody is happy,” according to Altman. The comment makes sense as Microsoft has been leveraging the benefits of generative AI into its suite of services.

From the Bing search engine to its Microsoft Office suite of programs, the company is investing heavily in AI in hopes of securing a potentially large market share of a yet-to-be-scaled technology. And if Goldman Sachs’s report is correct, then AI’s effect on the market will be quite massive in the long term.

Finally, all of this comes as the GPT-4 Turbo was announced. With a new series of features and upgrades, GPT-4 Turbo is another push toward securing a large section of the AI marketplace before giants such as Google is able to get a proper footing.