OpenAI acquires AI design studio startup Global Illumination in its first known acquisition

OpenAI announced on Wednesday it has acquired AI design studio tech startup Global Illumination to work on enhancing its core products including ChatGPT. This marks OpenAI’s first acquisition as a “for-profit,” now valued at $30 billion. The financial details of the deal remain undisclosed.

“We’re very excited for the impact they’ll have here at OpenAI,” OpenAI wrote in a brief post published to its official blog. “The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on our core products including ChatGPT,” OpenAI said in a statement.

Founded in 2021 by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flynn, all of whom have previously worked at Meta Platforms’ Instagram. The  New York-based Global Illumination most recently worked on open-source technology related to online game production. Dimson is credited for contributing to the original code of Instagram’s content ranking algorithms, as per his personal website.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI took the internet by storm after it released its dialogue-based AI chatbot called ChatGPT. The new chatbot-powered AI, which has been hailed as a potential game-changer in the world of AI, is a language model trained by OpenAI to interact with humans in a conversational way. ChatGPT has made text- and image generation a mainstream hit. We even asked ChatGPT to tell us about itself.

Just five days after its launch, ChatGPT crossed one million users, according to a post by Open AI co-founder Sam Altman. To put that in perspective, it took Netflix 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months, Spotify 5 months, and Instagram 2.5 months to reach the one million users mark.

Since its launch about a month ago, ChatGPT has impressed many experts with its writing ability, proficiency in handling complex tasks, and its ease of use. ChatGPT is currently free to use but Altman said the company will at some point charge people to use the chatbot that many said could one day potentially replace humans.

OpenAI was founded in late 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a for-profit startup conducting research in artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in such a way as to benefit humanity as a whole. OpenIA aims to “freely collaborate” with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. Both founders are motivated in part by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.