OpenAI Acquires Consumer-Facing AI Specialist Global Illumination

OpenAI has acquired Global Illumination, a firm it says has been leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to build “creative tools, infrastructure and digital experiences.”

The entire Global Illumination team has joined OpenAI and will work on its core products, including ChatGPT, OpenAI said in a Wednesday (Aug. 6) blog post.

“The team 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 in the post. “We’re excited for the impact they’ll have here at OpenAI.”

Global Illumination most recently worked on Biomes, an open source sandbox massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) built for the web, according to that company’s website. That product allows users to “build, forage, play minigames and more” from their browser.

One of the company’s founders, Thomas Dimson, said in a LinkedIn post that he and the rest of the founding team will join OpenAI.

“A little news from our end — Global Illumination has been acquired by OpenAI! Much of my life has been spent working in consumer applications of AI and it’s clear that we are at an inflection point,” Dimson wrote in the post.

The founders of Global Illumination — Dimson, Taylor Gordon and Joey Flynn — previously worked at Instagram before launching their company in 2021, Reuters reported Wednesday.

This is the first known acquisition by OpenAI, according to the report.

It comes at a time when OpenAI may reportedly go bankrupt by 2024 if it continues to burn cash at its current rate.

The organization, which is responsible for turning generative AI into a household name with the launch of its ChatGPT product last fall, received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. It has also received other venture funding.

But, as PYMNTS reported Wednesday, those billions only go so far when dealing with the sophisticated, high-cost computing requirements and burgeoning scale of generative AI’s capabilities.

One of the company’s latest suggested use cases for its large language models (LLMs) is AI-assisted content moderation systems, which it says can be more accurate, consistent and faster, with a reduced need for human intervention.