OpenAI, a new artificial intelligence (AI) startup and rival to ChatGPT creators, raises $113 million in seed funding and hits a $260 million valuation just two months after launch reached.
Former AI researchers who worked at Google DeepMind and Meta co-founded Mistral AI in May 2023 to develop open-source generative AI models. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Arthur Mensch, said the initial funding “gives us the resources and networks we need to begin deploying new models of generative artificial intelligence.” Stated.
Prior to co-founding Mistral AI, Mensch was a researcher at Google Deep Mind. His two other co-founders, Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, worked at Facebook AI as research engineers and research scientists, respectively.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from JCDecaux, Rodolphe Saadé, Motier Ventures and others. The three of them will run the company in Paris and plan to release the first model of text-based generative AI in 2024.
The company is hiring rapidly, seeking out AI researchers, software engineers and product developers. At the time of this writing, the newly formed Mistral AI also had no social media presence.
Related: UK gets ‘early or priority access’ to AI models from Google and OpenAI
Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol to urge the country to take the lead in manufacturing the chips needed for AI technology.
OpenAI currently uses chips from Taiwan, but Altman revealed that in the future it may need an alternative supply of chips from South Korea.
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