OpenAI Announces $110B New Investment

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.NEW INVESTMENT:OpenAI stated, "AI demand is surging across consumers, developers, and businesses. Meeting that demand and providing everyone access to our products requires three things: compute, distribution, and capital. Today we're announcing $110B in new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation. This includes $30B from SoftBank, $30B from Nvidia, and $50B from Amazon. We've also signed a strategic partnership with Amazon and secured next generation inference compute with Nvidia. Additional financial investors are expected to join as the round progresses. These partnerships expand our global reach, deepen our infrastructure, and strengthen our balance sheet so we can bring frontier AI to more people, more businesses, and more communities worldwide. You can see that scale in our products. Codex brings the power of a top engineer to anyone who wants to build software. Weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M. More people are now creating, automating, and shipping software that once required a full engineering team. More than 9 million paying business users rely on ChatGPT for work, and startups, enterprises, and governments are building on the OpenAI platform to transform how their products and services are designed, delivered, and run."OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises, startups, and end consumers around the world. Amazon will also invest $50B in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15B investment and followed by another $35B in the coming months when certain conditions are met, the companies announced. "OpenAI and Amazon are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI's models, which will be available through Amazon Bedrock. Stateful developer environments are the next generation of how frontier models will be used, seamlessly enabling models to access elements like compute, memory, and identity. A Stateful Runtime Environment allows developers to keep context, remember prior work, work across software tools and data sources, and access compute. They're designed to handle ongoing projects and workflows. These stateful developer environments will be trained to run optimally on AWS's infrastructure and integrated with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and infrastructure services so customers' AI applications and agents run cohesively with the rest of their infrastructure applications running in AWS. The Stateful Runtime Environment is expected to launch in the next few months," the companies added.Meanwhile, The Information's Stephanie Palazzolothat OpenAI expects to raise an additional $10B from financial investors by the end of March, adding to the $110B it's secured from SoftBank, Amazon and Nvidia, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. That additional funding will bring OpenAI's post-investment valuation to $850B, including a $35B tranche of funding from Amazon conditional on the ChatGPT-maker either going public or achieving artificial general intelligence - a loosely defined term referring to AI that's on par with humans.ANTHROPIC AND THE DOW:Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated, "The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to "any lawful use" and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a "supply chain risk"-a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company-and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards' removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security. Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request. It is the Department's prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic's technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters-with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required."CHIP DEAL:Meta Platformshas inked an agreement to rent Google'sAI semiconductors, known as tensor processing units, to work on new AI models, The Information's Amir Efrati and Anissa Gardizy, citing a person involved in the talks. The multi-year pact is worth billions of dollars, the authors note.