Nvidia isn’t the only tech titan targeting the OpenAI deal

Generations later, how will historians describe November 30, 2022?

That was the day OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization based in San Francisco, introduced ChatGPT to the known universe.

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OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by, among others, entrepreneur, investor and current CEO Sam Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with the mission of developing “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence, defined as “highly autonomous systems that surpass men. at most economically valuable work.”

“We trained a model called ChatGPT that interacts in a conversational way,” OpenAi said on day one. “The dialog format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

The chatbot was seen internally as a “research preview,” Sandhini Agarwal, who works on policy at OpenAI, told MIT Technology Review; a tease of a more refined version of a two-year-old technology and an attempt to fix some of its flaws by gathering feedback from the public.

“We didn’t want to oversell it as a big, fundamental advance,” said Liam Fedus, an OpenAI scientist who worked on ChatGPT.

The public reacted very differently to ChatGPT and it went viral on social media, with users sharing examples of what they could do.

Apple CEO Tim Cook. The computer giant is one of several companies working with OpenAI.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

OpenAI CEO: “Our tools are part of people’s lives”

“I think it was definitely a surprise to all of us how much people started using it,” Agarwal said. “We work so hard on these patterns that we forget how surprising they can sometimes be to the outside world.”

Within five days of its launch, the chatbot attracted more than one million users.

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By comparison, it took Instagram about 2.5 months to reach one million downloads, while Netflix had to wait about 3.5 years to reach one million users, according to Exploding Topics, which cited by Statista, Reuters and Similarweb.

“We’re excited to introduce ChatGPT to get user feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI isn’t the only one excited about ChatGPT. It now has more than 200 million weekly active users — twice as many as it had last November, Axios reported on Aug. 29.

OpenAI said more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use its products, and usage of its automated application programming interface (API) has doubled since the launch of the GPT-4o mini in July.

“People are now using our tools as part of their everyday lives, making a real difference in areas like healthcare and education – whether they’re helping with routine tasks, solving tough problems or unlocking creativity,” Altman said in a statement to Axios.

In June, Apple (AAPL) has named OpenAI the first official partner for its AI platform, Apple Intelligence. Apple’s new AI will include an improved Siri voice assistant, text correction and custom emoji creation.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said the tech giant has big plans for the chatbot, including integrating ChatGPT into iPhone, Mac and iPad experiences, “enabling users to draw on a broad knowledge base about the world.”

“We’re very excited about Apple Intelligence and remain incredibly optimistic about the extraordinary possibilities of AI and its ability to enrich customers’ lives,” Cook told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Aug. 1 .

“We will continue to make significant investments in this technology and dedicate ourselves to the innovation that will unlock its full potential.”

Both Apple, which is slated to launch its iPhone 16 series in September, and AI chip giant Nvidia (NVDA) is looking to put money into OpenAI to strengthen its positions in the highly competitive AI race.

Nvidia, arguably the biggest beneficiary of the AI ​​frenzy due to growing demand for its AI semiconductor chips, has invested in other companies. In August, Nvidia’s most recent 13-F filing on its holdings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed it held a total of nearly $400 million in five companies, including Arm Holdings.

The investment would be part of a new OpenAI fundraising round and would value the ChatGPT maker at more than $100 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Venture capital firm Thrive Capital is leading the round, which will total several billion dollars, and software mainstay Microsoft (MSFT) is expected to attend as well.

How much these tech heavyweights will invest in OpenAI in this round has not been determined. To date, Microsoft has been the main strategic investor in OpenAI; gets a 49% share of the AI ​​startup’s profits after investing $13 billion in several tranches since 2019.

Fight for a slice of the AI ​​market

While OpenAI faces serious competition from other AI startups and big tech companies, ChatGPT remains the market leader.

Facebook’s parent meta platforms (THE TARGET) said its Llama AI models are used by companies including Goldman Sach (GS) and AT&T (T) for business functions such as customer service, document review, and computer code generation

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Llama models have been downloaded nearly 350 million times since Meta began releasing them publicly last year, an increase from the 300 million downloads the company announced when it released the largest version of the more recent Llama 3 model at the end of July.

Usage through cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure also grew, doubling between May and July this year.

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google and launched last year.

The world’s most popular search engine ran into trouble in February when users discovered that Gemini couldn’t reliably create images of white people.

With the latest version of its image generator, Imagen 3, Google said, “We’ve made significant progress in providing a better user experience when generating images of people.”

“We do not support the generation of photorealistic, identifiable people, depictions of minors, or overly gory, violent, or sexual scenes,” Google senior director Dave Citron said in a blog post.

On August 28, Google, which had disabled Gemini’s ability to describe any human, began reactivating the feature for users who pay to use the English version of the chatbot.

Elon Musk, who stepped down from his OpenAI board seat in 2018 over potential conflict of interest issues over Tesla’s development of AI for self-driving cars, now runs his own artificial intelligence program called xAI.

In June, Musk threatened to ban iPhones, iPads and Macs from the office if Apple integrated ChatGPT into Apple’s operating system.

The ban would be in place for all its companies, including SpaceX and X, formerly Twitter, and even visitors would have to leave their devices at the door.

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