Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates on industry-leading AI coverage.
OpenAI is on a buying spree. Recently, the company, valued at around $90 billion and known for ChatGPT, announced it had acquired Rockset, a small startup specializing in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and related technologies that help generative AI models access selected data sources.
Now, sources close to OpenAI have confirmed that it has acquired Multi (formerly known as Remotion), a small New York City-based startup with five employees. Multi focuses on screen sharing and collaboration tools for Mac users. This marks OpenAI’s third publicly known acquisition, following its purchase of Global Illumination, a web-based MMORPG maker, last year.
Details about the terms of the deal, including financial specifics, were not disclosed. OpenAI also did not provide further information about what the Multi team and its technology would be focused on.
Multi’s co-founder and CEO, Alexander Embiricos, shared on his social media account that he and presumably the entire Multi team have joined OpenAI’s “ChatGPT desktop team.” This team is responsible for building the ChatGPT desktop app for Mac, which was released in May 2024.
Embiricos expressed his excitement about joining the ChatGPT desktop team and encouraged users to send feedback and bug reports.
Multi broke the news to its users and followers in a blog post, discussing their vision of working “with computers” using AI. The startup expressed excitement about joining OpenAI.
There has been speculation that OpenAI will utilize Multi to enable its AI models like GPT-4 to perform actions on a user’s computer based on text or voice prompts. For example, you might request, “ChatGPT, create a spreadsheet of my work hours and send it to my manager,” and it would execute the task.
Following the acquisition, Multi announced that it will end support for its current app on July 24, 2024, and will delete all user data. Users are advised to export their data before this date using the “Export Session Notes” setting on their account page. Multi is also accepting requests for extensions to this deletion date and offering recommendations for alternatives upon request via email.
Founded as Remotion in 2019, Multi began as a Zoom-style video conferencing and screen sharing tool for desktop PCs, raised $13 million in funding, and launched its initial app in October 2020. Last summer, the company rebranded to Multi and shifted its focus to helping technical teams collaborate more effectively, regardless of their location.
The revamped Multi app emphasized screen sharing across multiple desktop computers, allowing team members to work together in shared views, annotate, and blend their distinct app views into a single interface. A few months ago, Multi launched an iOS beta app and introduced large language model (LLM)-powered summaries for shared work sessions and video calls.
Interestingly, Multi previously stated that “chatbots are not the future,” referencing concerns that current chat interfaces for LLMs did not provide sufficient context for user interaction. Now, Multi’s entire team is joining OpenAI, a company known for its chatbot, ChatGPT, and will be working on enhancing the ChatGPT desktop experience.