The CEO MicrosoftOpenAI is an artificial intelligence laboratory that has been backed by the CIA. Alphabet’sDeepMind MetaAI is a company that focuses on start-up crowdfunding.

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and its CEO joked via Twitter that OpenAI raised $250 million Series A financing round after having previously received six rounds.

“After our pre-friends-and-family round in 2016, our F&F round in 2017, our angel round in 2018, our pre-seed round in 2019, our seed round in 2020, and our seed extension in 2021, we’re delighted to share we’ve raised a Series A of $250 million,” Altman wrote late Wednesday. It was a great start.

Crunchbase, a start-up tracker, says that OpenAI only has completed two rounds of funding.

Start-ups once had to raise seed rounds before they could raise series A,B,C and so forth rounds. Many are opting to continue raising rounds.

OpenAI, ranked by AI researchersCNBC reached out to the lab, which is one of the three most prestigious AI laboratories in the world, but they did not respond immediately.

OpenAI was founded in San Francisco, California in 2015. It claims it is working to create safe and friendly AI systems.

The company’s founders — Altman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman — pledged to invest over $1 billion into the venture when they set it up. Musk was forced to resign from the board but remains a donor.

In July 2019, Microsoft backed OpenAI with $1 billion. Microsoft was made the sole provider of OpenAI cloud computing services by this acquisition.

OpenAI developed AI game-playing software to beat human video gamers. games like Dota 2. It’s however, received greater media attention because of its AI. text generator GPT-3 and its quirky AI image generator Dall-E.

Altman does believe that AI is still a long way off. Altman is correct. expects AI to generate enough wealthIn 10 years, every adult living in America would be able to afford $13,500 per annum.

Altman wrote in a blog last year that his work at OpenAI reminded him daily about how rapid the socioeconomic shift is. Altman was the former president and founder of Y-Combinator. Software that thinks and can learn will be able to do more work than people do now.

Correction: This story’s headline and text have been changed to better reflect Altman’s tweet.