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Welcome to The Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, October 3rd, 2024.

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I'm Brian McCullough. Today, OpenAI raised their

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round and it basically broke all the

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records. The whole WordPress mess has gotten

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so crazy that WP Engine is suing,

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using Rayban meta smartglasses to dox people

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in real time, and you'll never guess

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the reason why you're about to see

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more ads on streaming video. Hint, you'll

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likely endure it. Here's what you missed today in

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the world of tech. Well

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they did it y'all. OpenAI raised $6.6

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billion, led by Thrive Capital, valuing the

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company at $157 billion with

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participation from Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank,

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and others. They also

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got a $4 billion revolving line of

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credit from JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and others.

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That would bring its total liquidity at this point

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to more than $10 billion. This

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is the largest VC deal of all

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time. This also makes OpenAI the third

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most valuable VC backed company after ByteDance

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and SpaceX, and OpenAI

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is now worth far more than any

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VC backed startup at the time of

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its IPO. Enough superlatives

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for you, quoting Axios. OpenAI

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is planning to shift to a for-profit structure

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and investors can ask for their money back

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if it hasn't completed those changes in two

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years Axios has learned. The

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new funding will allow us to double

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down on our leadership in frontier AI

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research, increase compute capacity, and continue building

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tools that help people solve hard problems,

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OpenAI said in a blog post, and quote. Thrive,

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which again led the round, invested around

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$1.3 billion with an exclusive option to

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invest up to $1 billion more at

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the same $157 billion valuation through 2025. OpenAI

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has asked investors to avoid backing

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rival startups such as Anthropic and

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XAI, quoting the Financial Times.

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During the negotiations, the company made clear that

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it expected an exclusive funding arrangement of $1

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billion.