Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest has taken a stake in OpenAI, the popular artificial intelligence player that’s behind ChatGPT. In a Thursday email to clients, the St. Petersburg, Florida-based asset manager said her ARK Venture Fund has invested in OpenAI as of Wednesday. “OpenAI is at the forefront of a Cambrian explosion in artificial intelligence capability, having produced several of the most influential breakthroughs in foundational AI research, including both the GPT and DALLE series of models, and launching the first major consumer application of generative AI, ChatGPT, which is the fastest application in history to grow to 100 million active users,” Ark said in the email. Wood’s firm launched the venture fund in September 2022, giving small investors access to the venture capital market with as little as $500 . The fund has invested in more than 40 companies, including SpaceX, Discord and Epic Games. She previously said OpenAI’s ChatGPT has the so-called data advantage, which she thinks is the “secret sauce.” Wood added that the chatbot is able to produce convincing content because it’s scraping the entire history of the internet and answering questions based on that history. The widely followed Wood has been a big AI bull, saying it’s the most important catalyst in every corner of her disruptive innovation strategy. She has called Tesla, with its robotaxi ambition, ” the biggest AI opportunity in the world. ” Wood has also spoken highly of DeepMind, an AI intelligence research lab acquired by Google in 2014, calling it “one of the best AI companies in the world.”
