OpenAI is finally going to Open AI!
Early in the morning, Altman solemnly announced, "In the next few months, we will open source a powerful reasoning model".
This is the first open-source model by OpenAI since GPT-2.
Currently, the official has released a model feedback form to collect opinions from developers in the community, hoping to create an extremely excellent open-source model.
OpenAI's open-source model is estimated to possibly adopt MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses
Altman said that the decision to open source was carefully considered by the internal team and delayed by other priorities before being announced today.
"And now, open source is a top priority for OpenAI".
Before the first reasoning model is officially open-sourced, it will be evaluated according to OpenAI's preparation framework. At the same time, some beta users (starting from San Francisco) will participate in early prototype evaluation.
More notably, riding the wave of 4o image generation, ChatGPT's users have surged by millions in the past hour.
It's worth knowing that after ChatGPT's launch, it took 5 days to increase by 1 million users
And just now, OpenAI announced its largest-ever new round of financing, amounting to $40 billion, led by SoftBank.
Now, OpenAI's valuation has reached $300 billion, second only to Musk's SpaceX ($350 billion).
OpenAI Open Sources Reasoning Model, First Since GPT-2
COO Brad Lightcap wrote a long article explaining why the team ultimately chose to open source, and why now?
The answer is actually quite simple: developers, enterprises, and government customers have made such a demand.
OpenAI serves millions of developers daily - many rely on a combination of proprietary and open-source models to build AI products.
Since 2020, they have provided cutting-edge models through API and released models like GPT-2 and Whisper to the open-source community.
As models improve, more people want to run them in various scenarios.
Through conversations with startups and developers, OpenAI clearly recognized the importance of supporting diverse needs, such as custom fine-tuning for specific tasks, more adjustable latency, local running, or deployments requiring complete data control.
Of course, OpenAI will continue to provide cutting-edge models through API and ChatGPT, but API alone cannot fully satisfy many scenarios developers want to build in their preferred locations or ways.
Therefore, their goal in launching this open-source model is precisely to address this issue: expanding developers' access to powerful AI while maintaining high standards of safety and responsible deployment.
OpenAI API researcher Steven Heidel said, "This model can run on consumer-grade hardware".
Many netizens speculate that o1-mini is most likely to be open-sourced.
Largest Single-Round Financing in Tech History, Valuation Reaches $300 Billion
While open-sourcing models, they also received money from investors.
As reported by WSJ over the weekend, OpenAI secured $40 billion in the latest financing round, setting a record for a private tech company's single-round financing.
According to PitchBook, this financing round is almost 3 times the previous record for a private tech company.
This funding directly pushed OpenAI's valuation to $300 billion, on par with ByteDance, second only to SpaceX.
SoftBank, backed by Masayoshi Son, invested as much as $30 billion, which is quite generous. It's worth noting that SoftBank is also a participant in the "Stargate".
Microsoft, as a core investor in OpenAI, along with well-known venture capital firms like Coatue, Altimeter, and Thrive, also joined this "capital feast".
However, this massive financing has an additional condition:
If OpenAI fails to complete the transformation from a non-profit organization to a for-profit entity by December 31, the financing amount may be reduced to up to $10 billion.
This condition undoubtedly adds more drama to OpenAI's next steps.
References:
https://x.com/sama/status/1906793591944646898
https://x.com/sama/status/1906771292390666325
This article is from the WeChat public account "New Intelligence", author: New Intelligence, editor: Peach I'm Tired, published by 36kr with authorization.
