Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter (now X), has recently secured $30 million (Rs 2,493,428,880) in funding for his new artificial intelligence (AI) startup, capitalizing on the growing interest in technologies such as ChatGPT.
Agrawal's AI initiative is being funded by Khosla Ventures, one of the early supporters of OpenAI, along with Index Ventures and First Round Capital.
Even though there is less information about the name of the new business or what it will make, but insiders share that it will create computer programs for developers who work on big language models, similar to what OpenAI's ChatGPT does. Agrawal joining the AI field shows a trend where tech leaders are getting involved in this growing area of technology.
Notably, Elon Musk fired Mr Agrawal shortly after becoming the new boss of X, formerly Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion in 2022.
Mr. Agrawal became the first CEO of Twitter with Indian roots in November 2021. He went to IIT Bombay and Stanford. He started working at Twitter in 2011 when there were less than 1,000 people in the company. In 2017, he became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). At just 39 years old, he became one of the youngest leaders of a big tech company.
During a dinner with Parag Agarwal months before Musk completed the Twitter acquisition, Musk discovered he lacked a key leadership characteristic.
This was revealed by Walter Isaacson, a writer who spent three years trailing the Tesla CEO for his biography 'Elon Musk'. "He's a nice guy," said Mr Musk but one of his maxims is that managers should not aim to be liked, Mr Isaacson wrote, as per the WSJ report. "What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon and Parag is not that," Mr Musk said after the meeting.
