Report: OpenAI closes $300 million funding round at $27 billion-$29 billion valuation

OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, has closed a more than $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, TechCrunch reported on Friday.

Meanwhile, Italy has lifted its block on ChatGPT after temporarily banning it over data privacy concerns last month, the artificial intelligence chatbot's owner said Friday.

ChatGPT caused a global sensation when it was released last year for generating essays, songs, exams and even news articles from brief prompts.

But critics have fretted over how ChatGPT and its competitors collect and process their data.

In March, Italy became the first Western country to take action against the popular AI chatbot.

The country's data protection watchdog had said that US firm OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, had no legal basis to justify the mass collection and storage of personal data for training the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform.