Artificial intelligence (AI) technology firm OpenAI announced a new funding round of $6.6 billion, boosting its valuation to an impressive $157 billion. This figure represents nearly double its earlier valuation of $80 billion, reported earlier this year.

The new round of funding was led by venture-capital firm Thrive Capital, with additional investors including Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Fidelity, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, United Arab Emirates-based MGX and Tiger Global. In 2024, OpenAI is projecting a $5 billion net loss on $3.7 billion in revenue, CNBC reported . Next year, the company is targeting $11.6 billion in revenue, per the report.

“We are making significant progress towards our goal of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” OpenAI stated in a press release announcing the funding. “Every week, over 250 million individuals worldwide leverage ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity, and learning. Businesses across various sectors are seeing improvements in productivity and operations, and developers are using our platform to build a new generation of applications. And we’re just getting started.”

OpenAI currently employs approximately 1,700 individuals, having hired over 1,000 since the beginning of the year. The recent funding “will allow us to intensify our leadership in cutting-edge AI research, expand our computing capacity, and continue developing tools that empower people to solve complex problems,” OpenAI noted in a blog post published on Wednesday.

“Our aim is to make advanced intelligence a widely accessible resource,” the company stated in its blog post. “We’re grateful to our investors for their confidence in us, and we look forward to collaborating with our partners, developers, and the broader community to shape an AI-powered ecosystem and a future that benefits everyone. By working together with key partners, including the U.S. and allied governments, we can unlock the full potential of this technology.”

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization by CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk (who is no longer involved with OpenAI and has established his own artificial intelligence company, xAI), and other individuals.

Last week, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati, announced her departure after six and a half years. In a message to company employees, she stated that “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” Soon after, OpenAI's Chief Research Officer, Bob McGrew, and Barret Zoph, the Vice President of post-training research, also announced their departures from the company.

Earlier this year, OpenAI found itself at the center of a controversy involving actress Scarlett Johansson, who disclosed that she had declined the company’s request to reprise her role in the film “Her” and lend her voice to ChatGPT. Subsequently, she expressed her “shock” and “anger” when the company proceeded to use a voice that bore a striking resemblance to hers . In a statement provided to Variety , Johansson stated that her legal representatives contacted OpenAI to request the removal of Sky’s voice, one of the new voices in the GPT-4 chatbot that sounded remarkably similar to her own, from the platform .

OpenAI serves as one of Apple’s key collaborators in developing new AI features that are being introduced for the iPhone 16 and other devices. OpenAI has also entered into agreements with publishers and news organizations — to secure licensing rights for content to train its AI models and to feature their content in search results — including Conde Nast, the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, LeMonde, NewsCorp, Prisa Media, Time and Vox Media. Conversely, the New York Times and other newspapers have filed lawsuits against OpenAI , along with Microsoft, alleging that the tech companies have engaged in copyright infringement by utilizing the publishers’ content to train their AI systems.

(Pictured above: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman)

Now dig into a data-fueled VIP+ subscriber report …