OpenAI has announced new funding worth $40 billion. The developer of ChatGPT says it will allow it to push the boundaries of AI research, scale its computing infrastructure, and provide more powerful tools to 500 million users.

The company's valuation has risen to $300 billion. Earlier, Bloomberg wrote that the round was led by SoftBank. In its blog, OpenAI said it was excited to work with the Japanese investment holding company:

"Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity."

Among other things, the newly launched image generator based on the flagship GPT-4o model has been launched in ChatGPT for free users. This news was announced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in X. 

Initially, the new feature was made available to everyone, but due to high demand, access had to be restricted, so the image generator was only available to subscribers until now.