Cathie Wood's Ark Invest has acquired a stake in OpenAI, the popular artificial intelligence player behind the viral message bot ChatGPT. In an email to her clients Thursday, the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based asset management firm said her ARK Venture Fund invested in OpenAI as of Wednesday. “OpenAI has been at the forefront of the Cambrian explosion in artificial intelligence capabilities, producing some of the most impactful breakthroughs in fundamental AI research, including both the GPT and DALLE series of models, and leading the way in generative AI. We launched ChatGPT, our leading consumer application, which is the fastest application ever to reach 100 million active users,” Ark said in an email. Wood's company launched her Venture Fund in September 2022, offering small investors access to the Venture Capital market for as little as $500. The fund has invested in more than 40 companies, including SpaceX, Discord, and Epic Games. She has previously said that her ChatGPT in OpenAI has a so-called data advantage, which she considers to be the “secret sauce.” Wood added that chatbots can create compelling content because they scrape the entire history of the internet and answer questions based on that history. Wood, who is widely followed, is a big bull on AI, saying it is the most important catalyst for all aspects of her own disruptive innovation strategy. She calls Tesla, with its robotaxis ambitions, “the world's biggest AI opportunity.” Wood also spoke highly of DeepMind, the AI intelligence lab that Google acquired in 2014, calling it “one of the best AI companies in the world.” world. “