Why SoftBank’s massive investment in OpenAI is exciting for ChatGPT
When I saw OpenAI’s surprise Deep Research announcement on Sunday, I didn’t know what to make of it. This couldn’t be about the DeepSeek earthquake … The post Why SoftBank’s massive investment in OpenAI is exciting for ChatGPT appeared first on BGR.
When I saw OpenAI's surprise Deep Research announcement on Sunday, I didn't know what to make of it. This couldn't be about the DeepSeek earthquake last week. The Chinese startup came up with an AI model as powerful as OpenAI's ChatGPT o1 reasoning model that costs a fraction of the cost to train. But then OpenAI released the o3-mini reasoning models on Friday, which should have dealt with some of the DeepSeek problems.
ChatGPT Deep Research was about something else, though, yes, you can argue it's another display of force in the face of stronger-than-expected Chinese competition. Deep Research is an AI agent like Operator. DeepSeek has neither.
A few hours later, I'm no longer surprised by OpenAI's action. This had a different, carefully calculated purpose. OpenAI traveled to Japan to ask for money, and products like ChatGPT Deep Research are what make that happen. And money OpenAI received, to the tune of multiple billions. Make that tens of billions of dollars, if some reports are accurate.
SoftBank will become a big investor in OpenAI, with the two parties forming a Japan-specific venture. While that's probably great news for the future of ChatGPT software, I'm more interested in what SoftBank financing can mean for the ChatGPT hardware that's supposedly coming.
The post Why SoftBank’s massive investment in OpenAI is exciting for ChatGPT appeared first on BGR.
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Why SoftBank’s massive investment in OpenAI is exciting for ChatGPT originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 3 Feb 2025 at 18:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
