OpenAI Seeks $40B in SoftBank-Led Funding Round

In a seismic shift for the AI landscape, OpenAI is reportedly in early discussions to secure a jaw-dropping $40 billion in funding, with tech giant SoftBank leading the charge. This colossal investment would catapult OpenAI’s valuation to an astonishing $340 billion—nearly doubling its worth in mere months. Just in October, the ChatGPT creator raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation, making this potential deal a staggering leap forward, signaling unparalleled confidence in the future of artificial intelligence.

In addition, OpenAi released its new o3-mini AI service. This is clearly in response to competition of the new hit Chinese AI firm DeepSeek.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman said that the competition from DeepSeek offers “an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price.”

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“We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.”

ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users can access OpenAI o3-mini, with Enterprise access coming in February. o3-mini will replace OpenAI o1-mini in the model picker, offering higher rate limits and lower latency, making it a compelling choice for coding, STEM, and logical problem-solving tasks. As part of this upgrade, OpenAI said it is tripling the rate limit for Plus and Team users from 50 messages per day with o1-mini to 150 messages per day with o3-mini. Additionally, o3-mini now works with search to find up-to-date answers with links to relevant web sources.

“This is an early prototype as we work to integrate search across our reasoning models.,” explained Open AI.

“Today’s launch marks the first time we’re bringing reasoning capabilities to our free users, an important step towards broadening accessibility to advanced AI in service of our mission,” said OpenAI.

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.

Sam Altman has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and one of the “Best Young Entrepreneurs in Technology” by Businessweek. He is also the founder of the Long Term Future Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in companies working to solve long-term problems like climate change and pandemics.