April 1 AI News.
AI news is so incredible that April 1st can be very tricky to navigate, but let’s give it a go. OpenAI get valued at $300 billion and returns to their open roots. Krea adds chat style editing and 3D model generation and Unitree unveils the most dexterous robot hand ever seen.
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But sadly it seems we’re not getting text-to-bark. Here’s today’s Genuine AI news. OpenAI made the headlines today for several reasons. Firstly, they managed to successfully raise another $40 billion in funding in a new round led by SoftBank.
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This set a new record for the largest private tech financing ever and values OpenAI at a staggering $300 billion. They announced this with an article entitled “New Funding to Build towards AGI” No doubt that the new hyper valuation was largely driven by some incredible growth.
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A new report showed that ChatGPT has reached 20 million paid subscribers and now has a monthly revenue of $415 million. That’s up an incredible 30% from three months ago. On top of that, Sam Altman posted that thanks to their incredible 4o image generation that they had added 1 million subscribers in one hour.
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It would seem like the shipping of several new products in a short span has really paid off. Despite the lukewarm initial reception to GPT 4.5 OpenAI also announced plans to launch its first open source model since GPT2. Sam Altman posted on X “We are excited to release a powerful new open weight language model with reasoning in the coming months and we want to talk to devs about how to make it maximally useful.” This move sees a remarkable return to OpenAI actually being open after they’ve received so much criticism recently for seemingly doing the exact opposite of what their name professes.
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It would seem that once again the pressure from other models is causing OpenAI to step up its game. Krea made two big announcements today. Firstly, they announced that they are introducing natural language image editing into their workflows via the Gemini models and secondly, they showed off a whole new UI which includes a brand new 3D tool.
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This means that users can now create 3D objects from an image or a text prompt in just a few seconds via the Krea service. And finally, Unitree Robotics has created a new robotic hand with 20 degrees of freedom and it can perform some really incredible moves. The Dex 5 dextrous hand has 16 active and 4 passive joints, giving this hand incredibly smooth, precise and agile movements.
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It can also include 94 touch sensors for incredible sensitivity when needed. Every day we see more and more progress in robotics and these hands are another big step towards matching human movement.