Tech titans have rallied support for open source amid the current upheaval surrounding ChatGPT parent company OpenAI’s leadership shift.
The recent drama surrounding OpenAI’s leadership could provide the publicity that other AI technology businesses need to increase their uptake and revenue.
Many big companies, including Salesforce, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have started rerouting their investment towards certain other open-source AI businesses after Sam Altman abruptly left OpenAI as the CEO of the AI powerhouse.
The unlucky catastrophe at OpenAI has helped two businesses: Hugging Face, a New York-based startup that creates tools for creating machine learning apps, and Mistral AI.
HuggingFace had reported a valuation of up to $4.5 billion prior to this, following a $235 million venture round in August. The French-American open-source technology company has received over $400 million in funding from up to 30 tech investors, including Sequoia Capital, Qualcomm, IBM, Google, Nvidia, and Intel.
Hugging Face’s co-founder and CEO, Thomas Wolf, noted a few weeks before the OpenAI scandal that his company is “not following the Silicon Valley playbook.”
“AI builders are growing superfast, raising and burning money. We are not in that mindset. We’ve been around for seven years, and didn’t need to raise money. We can make plans for the long run without a problem.”
But Schmidt and other business titans have backed Mistral AI, which is associated with Alphabet. The artificial intelligence startup still hopes to raise an extra $400 million at a $1 billion valuation despite having raised up to $113 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and other major players in Silicon Valley.
