ALBAWABA – SoftBank, the Japanese multinational conglomerate, announced a fund of approximately $40 billion to support OpenAI, the American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization, amid recent developments by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company that creates open-source large language models (LLMs).
SoftBank supports OpenAI
SoftBank announced it is raising approximately $40 billion in support of OpenAI. This funding round could potentially increase the startup’s value to around $340 billion.
SoftBank made this announcement in response to DeepSeek's recent launch of a low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) model. According to sources, the funds will be in the form of convertible notes.
Notably, DeepSeek’s recent surge in popularity over the past week has sparked excitement in China and concern in the United States. The company is now strongly competing with ChatGPT at a much lower cost.
SoftBank made this announcement in response to DeepSeek's recent launch of a low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) model. (Shutterstock)
DeepSeek released its V3 model with significant features that outperform ChatGPT and Llama. Developers can now download and modify the new DeepSeek V3 model to perform multiple tasks, including coding, translation.
The company officially surpassed ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, in United Stated App store downloads last week.
Stargate project
On another note, the new Stargate joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank aims to invest around $500 billion in supporting artificial intelligence (AI) development in the United States (US) while competing with China.
