OpenAI is now one of the wealthiest private companies on Earth after successfully raising $6.6 billion in its latest funding round on a valuation of $157 billion.
“Every week, over 250 million people around the world use ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity, and learning,” the company wrote in its announcement post. “The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems.”
Existing backers such as Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Microsoft were joined by newcomers SoftBank and Nvidia. Apple, which had previously been in talks to invest, backed out earlier this week.
The funding news comes as OpenAI considers restructuring its core business from a nonprofit to a for-profit model in an effort to make itself more attractive to investors. “We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone, and we’re working with our board to ensure that we’re best positioned to succeed in our mission. The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters at the time.
The investment round also comes as OpenAI struggles to retain top talent. Since last November, when OpenAI’s nonprofit board of directors unsuccessfully attempted to oust CEO Sam Altman from the company, a steady stream of researchers, founders and C-suite executives have resigned. Researchers Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever both left in May, in protest of the company’s disregard of safety guidelines in favor of hawking “shiny products.” Chief technology officer Mira Murati tendered her resignation in late September, with research officer Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, senior research executive, quickly following suit.
According to a report from Reuters, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told employees that the company will offer to buy back their shares in the company at the new valuation. Some employees were allowed to cash out their shares earlier this year at OpenAI’s previous valuation of $86 billion. As part of the proposed restructuring plan, Altman could receive as much as $150 billion in equity, making him one of the richest people on the planet.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.