OpenAI's Investments on Tech Startups Show the Future of AI

OpenAI's Investments in Emerging Technology Companies Provide Clues About the Direction of Artificial Intelligence

Since last November, OpenAI has provided financial backing to over a dozen firms that develop artificial intelligence (A.I.) hardware, software that assists programmers in their work, and productivity tools.

OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has set off a race among big and small tech companies to develop new artificial intelligence products. OpenAI, which started out as a research nonprofit but is now worth $29 billion thanks to investors' hopes that it will keep making successful products like ChatGPT, is one of the companies in the race.

OpenAI started a $100 million Startup Fund and a programme called Converge in November to help startups and companies with good ideas for new A.I. products. The Startup Fund, which is backed by investors like Microsoft, wants to make big bets on a small number of early-stage companies in fields where A.I. "can have a transformative effect," according to OpenAI's website.

According to OpenAI's statement and statistics produced by C.B. Insights, a private market research organisation, OpenAI has provided financial support to approximately a dozen different startups over the course of the past few months by means of the Startup Fund and the Converge program. It's clear that the company wants to have a say in the future of A.I. technologies, but it's not clear how it plans to get there.

Kyunghyun Cho, a professor of data science at New York University and former research scientist at Facebook A.I. Research, says, "It's not surprising that OpenAI set up a startup fund to get people interested in A.I. and find new ways to use it. It's not surprising that OpenAI created a startup fund to spark interest and new use cases for A.I. The question is whether OpenAI will make new apps for consumers directly or whether they will sell access to their code to other companies who will use it to make new products."

OpenAI is putting its money on everything from chip makers to legal help. A.I.

OpenAI's choices show a few common themes. The company is putting money into new businesses that are focused on productivity, A.I. infrastructure, and making more things. A.I. is a term that was popularised by ChatGPT. It refers to programmes that can make text, images, and other content based on simple instructions.

For example, OpenAI led a series C investment in Descript, a company that makes an algorithm-powered video editor that is as easy to use as a simple text editor. It also gave money to Harvey, an A.I.-powered platform for legal help, and Speak, an A.I. language tutor.

OpenAI also put money into a few companies that didn't make products for consumers, like Atomic Semi, which makes chips, qqbot.dev, which is a chatbot for software developers; and Anysphere and Cursor, which make IDE (integrated development environment), an app that helps programmers write code quickly.

In a report released on February 25, analysts from C.B. Insights said that these picks fit well with OpenAI's own plans for research and products. This includes GPT-4, OpenAI's next-generation language model, and a possible video generator that CEO Sam Altman talked about recently.

Altman said in a video promoting the fund in December that companies that get money from OpenAI's Startup Fund or Converge programme would also have access to OpenAI's models and programming as well as help from the company's research team.