best openai funding 2026

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain One company offers Bay Area employers artificial intelligence that filters potential hires by combing through 10,000 public online sources looking for references to violence or illegal drugs. Another uses the technology to scan workers' office emails for signs of dissatisfaction or burnout. Others offer AI analysis of workers' every online action in the workplace. As artificial intelligence gives new, powerful tools to em

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is trying to make it very clear that political contributions made by its leaders do not necessarily reflect the company’s views. “Our employees are free to participate in the political process in their personal capacities, including by donating or providing advice to candidates, campaigns, and political organizations. When they do that, they speak for themselves and not OpenAI,” the company said in a statement Monday. Op

A new draft bill that would regulate some of the most advanced artificial intelligence tools was released for public comment by Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte of California and Democratic Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts on Thursday. The Obernolte-Trahan bill, dubbed the Great American AI Act, would ask large AI developers to keep the government informed about the development of its frontier models, make plans to mitigate the most severe harms to cybersecu

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images If you thought AI’s endgame was a fully automated utopia where everyone finally lives in harmony, think again. According to Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton — often called “the godfather of AI” for his contributions to the tech — the future for AI in its current form is likely to be an economic dystopia. “I think the big companies are betting on it causing massive job replacement by AI, bec

Getty / Futurism A major tech selloff is shaking up Wall Street as the enormous gulf between AI company valuations and their lagging revenues continues to grow. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the stock market has been showing marked signs of “fragility,” with Nvidia slipping seven percent last week. Despite signs of an end to the ongoing federal shutdown buoying up some excitement, the AI chipmaker continued its plunge this week, sliding another three

Getty / Futurism Even the tech industry’s top AI models, created with billions of dollars in funding, are astonishingly easy to “jailbreak,” or trick into producing dangerous responses they’re prohibited from giving — like explaining how to build bombs, for example. But some methods are both so ludicrous and simple that you have to wonder if the AI creators are even trying to crack down on this stuff. You’re telling us that deliberately inserting typos is

Tom Werner / Getty Images The tech industry is making sure kids will be hooked on AI for generations — by proactively sinking its tendrils deep into the education system, long before we understand the effects of the tech on young minds. Top leaders in the space, from Microsoft to OpenAI, are pouring millions of dollars into schools, colleges, and universities, often providing students with access to their AI products. The justification, touted in a fresh N

Getty / Futurism The AI industry continues to pour tens of billions of dollars into resource-intensive models and the infrastructure to run them. In the face of it all, their promises of kickstarting a technological revolution that could one day be immensely profitable remain convincing enough for investors to prop up sky-high valuations — at least for now. But actually turning a profit is likely many years away for the vast majority of AI companies, and t

The AI resource repository Hugging Face is a little like GitHub for AI, except a recent news event—an OpenAI model autonomously attacking it—made it famous among people who aren’t developers. Now, according to Business Insider, it’s floating the idea of being acquired. Smart timing! Insider’s story, which cites anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” says Hugging Face is allied with “a bank”—no word on which one—and does not yet have a deal. Insider s

I wrote on Monday that rumors were circulating that Hugging Face was looking to be acquired for about $13 billion. That’s exactly what is now happening according to anonymous insiders who spoke to the Information and Business Insider. The deal is reportedly still being finalized and may still crumble. The apparent buyer is Nvidia. The AI chip colossus has been hovering around the AI resource repository for years, looking like a slobbering cartoon wolf hold

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more than 100 other companies and organizations are calling for a major push to defend against cyber threats powered by the most advanced AI models that, somewhat ironically, the industry itself is racing to put out in the world. The companies, which also include Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, signed a joint letter published Thursday calling on industry leaders and governments to carry out a “global surge in cyber defense.” “

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Software giant Salesforce is planning to invest $15 billion in San Francisco over the next five years to strengthen the city's dominance in artificial intelligence. "This $15 billion investment reflects our deep commitment to our hometown—advancing AI innovation, creating jobs, and helping companies and our communities thrive in this incredible new era," said Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff in a statement. The funding is t

Getty / Futurism The walls continue to close in on OpenAI. The company recently raised an additional $10 billion in funding, bringing its valuation one small step closer to $1 trillion. But actually making any money continues to be an enormous challenge for the ChatGPT maker. The company’s panicked executives have made it abundantly clear that distracting “side quests” must be abandoned, while doubling down on both enterprise and coding. The purported goal

Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Tech giants Meta and Google-owned YouTube suffered a devastating legal blow yesterday after losing a landmark social media addiction trial, a watershed outcome that’s likely to reverberate across the social media industry — and shrapnel from that fallout could hit AI companies, too. In the case characterized by some as Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment,” a jury found that Meta and YouTube caused a young wo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images If you’re running a frontier AI company, now’s not the time to rest on your laurels. The stakes could hardly be higher: whichever corporation manages to outmaneuver its rivals stands to capture not just enormous wealth, but significant political influence over what we’re told is one of the most consequential technologies in human history. As some child safety advocates r

No, AI agents did not discover a previously unknown Maya siteScientists are getting tired of amateurs parachuting into their fields and making ‘discoveries’ with AI.Scientists are getting tired of amateurs parachuting into their fields and making ‘discoveries’ with AI.“I woke up and checked the agents’ reports. ‘DAMN!’ They had found lots of villages and other regular shapes that looked like structures or houses,“ Pietro Miotti wrote on his blog. Image:

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images OpenAI leaders horrified staffers after proposing an “insane” plan to enrich the company by pitting world governments against each other. This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from The New Yorker’s sweeping new investigation into CEO Sam Altman, which documents his alarming pattern of lying and manipulating to build his AI empire, a behavior that some insiders likened to that o

Getty / Futurism On Thursday, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier announced his office was investigating OpenAI over a deadly school shooting last year that victims claim was at least partially inspired by conversations with ChatGPT. The shooting, which took place at Florida State University almost exactly a year ago, resulted in the death of two students and seven injuries. “AI should advance mankind, not destroy it,” Uthmeier said in a statement. “

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Workers across the US have had it with the prognostications of AI taking over the world. And their unions — or what’s left of them, anyway — are taking notice. Last week, the leaders of some of the largest trade unions in the US came together for a conference with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Axios reports. Together, they presented a united opposition against tech companies pushing AI

Insiders are claiming that OpenAI may soon receive a funding round valuing it at $1.2 trillion, according to the Financial Times. The intriguingly timed round could give OpenAI a higher valuation than its rival Anthropic once again, though it could also come around the same time as Anthropic’s IPO. The decision to give OpenAI this capital injection “will hinge on exactly when OpenAI decides to go public,” the Financial Times writes. In an interview publish