OpenAI has acquired a New York-based AI gaming startup for an undisclosed sum, the company announced on its website Wednesday.
Global Illumination is a venture-backed company with $14 million in funding and was working on a massively multiplayer online game called Biomes, which from the looks of it appears as an open source Minecraft-like game.
The team at Global Illumination, led by CEO Thomas Dimson, is filled with vets from Alphabet and Meta, as well as digital entertainment companies Pixar and Riot Games. Dimson himself was the former head of engineering at Instagram.
San Francisco-based OpenAI says the team will be deployed to work on "core products," which include ChatGPT, the company's chatbot that has exploded in popularity over the last year.
Many are speculating that the acquisition could be a move by OpenAI into the gaming space or into the creation of virtual worlds powered by AI.
