AI Money: OpenAI Secures $6.6 Billion as Startup Poolside Nets Funding for ‘Human-Level’ AI

In a whirlwind of investment activity, artificial intelligence companies secured unprecedented funding.

OpenAI led the pack at a $6.6 billion raise. Poolside secured $500 million in a Series B for AI-powered software development. HPC-AI Tech raised $50 million for video generation and infrastructure.

The AI gold rush is in full swing as investors bet big on the transformative potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values the company at $157 billion, according to a Wednesday (Oct. 2) press release.

The investment positions OpenAI to accelerate its mission of developing and deploying AGI for the benefit of humanity.

The San Francisco-based company, known for its ChatGPT language model, plans to use the capital to bolster its leadership in frontier AI research, expand computational capacity and enhance its suite of problem-solving tools. ChatGPT has garnered over 250 million weekly active users worldwide, transforming productivity across various industries and spawning a new generation of AI-powered applications.

The investment comes amid competition in the AI sector, with tech giants and startups vying for dominance in what many consider the next frontier of technological advancement. OpenAI’s valuation reflects growing investor confidence in AGI’s potential to revolutionize industries and create new economic opportunities.

Poolside, a startup building AI for software development, raised $500 million in a Series B funding round that closed over the summer, according to a Wednesday press release.

Poolside aims to create AI capable of “human-level intelligence” in software development, the release said. It plans to use the capital to expand its AI training capabilities, having already secured 10,000 Nvidia GPUs. The funding will also go toward market expansion and the growth of the company’s research and engineering teams.

“Only a handful of companies will reach AGI — and they are being forged at this very moment,” Poolside CEO Jason Warner said in the release. “We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence. Through our team, our applied research and a powerful revenue engine, Poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build.”

The startup’s first product will be an AI-powered code assistant for developers. It also plans to create tools that will allow anyone to build software.

HPC-AI Tech, a startup specializing in AI software infrastructure and video generation, secured $50 million in Series A funding, according to a Monday (Sept. 30) press release.

The funding will support platform development and client-base expansion, with a goal to reach 300 customers in three years.

HPC-AI Tech is known for its open-source projects Colossal-AI and Open-Sora, which have accumulated over 60,000 GitHub stars. Colossal-AI enables enterprises to scale large AI workloads, while Open-Sora focuses on efficient video generation.

The company’s commercial platforms, hpc-ai.com and video-ocean.com, offer AI model management and video creation capabilities, respectively. HPC-AI Tech has 50 key clients, with AWS, Alibaba, IBM, Intel and Oracle among its users.

The investment reflects growing interest in AI infrastructure and generative AI technologies as companies like HPC-AI Tech address increasing demand for scalable AI solutions and video generation tools.

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