OpenAI acquires New York-based startup Global Illumination

OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, has acquired a digital products company Global Illumination. It is the first known acquisition by the artificial intelligence firm.

As per the company, the entire workforce of the acquired company will join OpenAI to work on the company's core products including ChatGPT. The financial details have not been disclosed yet.

The New York-based company, Global Illumination was founded in 2021 by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon and Joey Flynn. All the founder members earlier were associated with Meta Platforms. The Microsoft-backed company did not specify what the Global Illumination team will be doing at OpenAI.

"Global Illumination is a company that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences," OpenAI said.

Global Illumination team members have previously designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook and have also made significant contributions at YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies, OpenAI said.

Following the announcement of OpenAI that it is adopting GPT-4 for content moderation, the announcement comes a day later. According to the company, by introducing AI technology in this space, it can help reduce mental stress by continual exposure to harmful or offensive content among human moderators.

"A content moderation system using GPT-4 results in much faster iteration on policy changes, reducing the cycle from months to hours. GPT-4 is also able to interpret rules and nuances in long content policy documentation and adapt instantly to policy updates, resulting in more consistent labelling," the company said.

OpenAI also said that judgments by language models are vulnerable to undesired biases and the results or outputs will need human intervention for careful monitoring, validation and refinement. It will also enable humans to be more focused on addressing complex cases.