OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Titanium Media App learned that in the early morning of September 28, Beijing time, OpenAI announced that from now on, users of the paid version of ChatGPT Plus and the enterprise version can achieve the "networking" function, that is, complete the Internet search through the Microsoft Bing search plug-in under GPT-4, providing users with the latest information and providing source links, not limited to data before September 2021.
In fact, OpenAI tested the networking feature in March this year, but later turned off the feature after user feedback that the plugin bypassed paywall content.
Today, ChatGPT is "back" to web browsing. According to the Titanium Media App editorial test, the "networking" function upgraded this morning has good feedback, and you can directly search Chinese web content. OpenAI says the "networking" feature will soon be extended to all ChatGPT users.
"We're back." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media.
With the advent of ChatGPT, it has swept the world and brought a new wave of AI big models. Nearly a year after its release, Ultraman, which created the software, is pushing OpenAI toward commercialization.
It is reported that OpenAI is in discussions with investors about selling shares, and the company seeks to sell shares at a valuation of about 90 billion US dollars (about 657.819 billion yuan), which means that OpenAI's valuation has tripled in less than a year. According to The Information, OpenAI plans to work with Apple designer Jony Ive to create a new AI hardware device.
OpenAI, with a valuation of $90 billion, is second only to ByteDance, Musk's SpaceX, two unicorn companies, and is roughly equivalent to the GDP (GDP) of Salt Lake City in the United States and Vienna, the music capital of Austria, in 2021, and this valuation highlights that OpenAI has begun to reshape the global technology landscape.
Ultraman said this week that ChatGPT's evolution will be like Apple's iPhone. Although the first iPhone was amazing when it was released, you can see from the current iPhone 15, the first iPhone is not enough functions, you should expect generative AI technology, especially the new changes brought by AI can do more imaginative ideas.
After more than 300 days, ChatGPT accelerated its evolution
On November 30 last year, the AI chatbot platform ChatGPT was born, with more than one million users in just 7 days and 100 million monthly active users in two months, becoming the fastest growing consumer application in history. At the same time, the software has also triggered a new round of global AI big model craze.
At present, ChatGPT has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, accounting for 20% of the world's total population.
In the past 302 days, the OpenAI team has not been idle, on the one hand, financing expansion, increasing recruitment, the number of employees increased by 370% to 1646, on the other hand, the team continues to update and optimize ChatGPT products, as far as possible to solve key problems such as security and illusion.
In January this year, OpenAI announced a deep cooperation with Microsoft and completed tens of billions of financing, and it was reported that OpenAI was valued at $29 billion after investment.
In early February, OpenAI released a paid version of ChatGPT Plus, priced at $20 per month, with skip-the-line access during peak hours, quick response, and priority access to new features and improvements.
In March, OpenAI released GPT-4 large model, which not only realizes multi-modality, but also supports image and text input and output, has powerful image recognition capabilities, comprehensively improves the number of texts, and supports multi-Chinese words, significantly improving the accuracy of answers, and is smarter than ChatGPT. Subsequently, Microsoft announced the integration of GPT-4 technology in Office suite, Bing Search and other products. Subsequently, OpenAI announced the addition of new features, support plugins and Bing search, and "networking" capabilities.
In May, Microsoft announced the opening of a new Bing search engine based on GPT-4 technology, users only need to log in to the Microsoft account to use Bing chat on mobile devices, Edge browsers, and search engine homepages.
In August, OpenAI announced that it had completed the acquisition of Global Illumination, a digital products startup, and brought the entire team under its umbrella, with new members involved in core product development, including ChatGPT. This is OpenAI's first public acquisition in its eight years of existence.
On September 21, OpenAI released the latest AI painting model DALL· E 3, fully integrated with ChatGPT, and greatly improved the AI effect, it is expected that from next month you can get image feedback directly through the ChatGPT dialog.
On September 27, The Information reported that iPhone designer Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been discussing building a new AI hardware device. The report believes that this consumer-grade hardware device can allow OpenAI to gain a competitive advantage in the AI consumer market in the future.
Not only product updates, OpenAI is also rapidly advancing commercialization.
According to the Wall Street Journal this week, OpenAI told investors that it expects to reach $1 billion in revenue this year and add billions more by 2024, mainly from ChatGPT personal paid version and large-model API licensing sales.
OpenAI is in talks with investors about selling shares, a deal that would allow employees to sell existing shares instead of the company issuing new shares to raise additional funds. Today, OpenAI will be valued at between $80 billion and $90 billion, about three times what it was earlier this year.
In addition, multiple news earlier said that OpenAI, an AI "behemoth", has aroused strong interest from investment giants such as Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan's SoftBank Group, and SoftBank is expected to invest in or buy part of OpenAI's shares. Son has said he hopes SoftBank will catch up with the generative AI boom that has swept Silicon Valley over the past year.
OpenAI's current ownership structure is 49% owned by Microsoft, and financial investors include Tiger Global Fund, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz in California, Thrive and K2 Global in New York, Founders Fund and others.
At this week's "AI Masters Forum: How AI Shapes the Future of Humanity" forum, computer scientist and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said that "the release of ChatGPT is indeed a magic moment." He believes that large language models represented by ChatGPT will bring great changes to the industry, "I am very excited about generative AI, but it will take some time to develop." ”
Ultraman said that the new technology and more creativity brought by AI allow us to do more and help implement wild ideas, although the outside world uses ChatGPT as a tool, but generative AI technology will get better and better year by year, if you have never looked at the present, you will find that the current AI technology is actually quite backward.
Ultraman revealed that he now travels around the world in different cities on six continents, and sees that everyone has high expectations for AI and thinks that tomorrow will be better, especially everyone thinks ChatGPT is cool, just like the first iPhone was also amazing when it was released, but you look at the iPhone from now on, you know that the first iPhone is not powerful enough.
For AI regulation, Altman stressed that he only has to worry about insufficient regulations and insufficient supervision, because the regulation of regulations is good, just like I often fly and believe that airplanes are safe, because airplanes follow regulations.
Financing exceeded $14.1 billion in half a year, and OpenAI drove industrial investment
With the popularity of ChatGPT, this technology has driven the wave of AI large model entrepreneurship and the AIGC (generative AI) industry continues to heat up. The total market value of the AI chip leader NVIDIA, which is supported by computing power, has already exceeded the trillion mark, becoming the world's largest semiconductor company.
Not only that, the algorithm and data segmentation industries have also ushered in opportunities, and the AI investment and financing market has gradually recovered. CB Insights data shows that in the first half of 2023, there were 86 financing transactions in the AIGC space, with equity financing exceeding US$14.1 billion, an increase of more than 5 times over the whole of 2022, and 18 companies have become unicorns.
Among them, OpenAI completed 10 billion yuan in financing, Inflection completed 1.2 billion yuan in Series B financing, Google and Amazon bet on Anthropic completed more than 4 billion US dollars in financing, and Cohere completed 270 million yuan in Series C financing.
Of the more than 360 generative AI technology companies counted by CB Insights, 27% have yet to raise any external equity funding. Meanwhile, AIGC infrastructure categories, such as foundational models, APIs, and vector database technologies, have received more than 70% funding since the third quarter of last year, accounting for 10% of all generative AI transactions; A quarter of the money goes to generative AI applications across industries, including text writing generation.
Compared with the Silicon Valley AI boom, the domestic market is in the "100-model war", benchmarking against ChatGPT and catching up, and the scale of investment and financing has also recovered.
In the first half of the year, the three giants of BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) made a move, and Tencent invested in Shenyan Technology, MiniMax, and Fengyuan; Baidu invested in Westlake Xinchen and Shengshu Technology; Alibaba's Ant Group has invested in Biotechnology Technology. In addition, Meituan invested in Zhipu AI and Lightyear.
On September 28, AI Company Fourth Paradigm (6682. HK) was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with an opening price of HK$63.1, up 13.49% from the issue price, with a total market capitalization of more than HK$27 billion. On the same day, AIGC computing power company Fengyuan Technology announced the completion of 2 billion yuan D round financing, more than 15 investors, Tencent and Meituan continued to recharge.
Zhang Yalin, founder and COO of Fengyuan, believes that the outbreak of AIGC large models has changed the AI ecology, and the development trend of the industry has begun to converge to vertical industry tracks based on large models.
Yuan Xucong, chief analyst of the AI industry at Toubao Research Institute, said that China has made significant progress in the field of AI, including algorithms, computing power, applications and data, especially AI algorithms are widely used in various fields, including the Internet, finance, medical care, manufacturing and education. These algorithms play a key role in recommender systems, ad optimization, risk assessment, and more. At the same time, China is actively promoting AI engineering, deeply integrating AI technology into the real economy, transforming theoretical algorithms into practical applications, and bringing more innovation and competitive advantages to enterprises and society.
Yuan believes that AI has the potential to become one of the most dynamic investment areas in the next decade, especially in many countries that have seen its strategic value. But he also stressed that investing in AI is risky due to factors such as immature technology, ethical difficulties, data privacy and fierce competition, and investors should carefully evaluate it.
(This article was first published on Titanium Media App, author | Lin Zhijia)