Visa, the renowned card payment company, recently unveiled a bold initiative called “Generative AI Ventures,” backed by a substantial investment of $100 million. This initiative is aimed at fostering the growth of the next wave of companies dedicated to advancing generative AI technologies and applications, poised to significantly influence the landscape of commerce and payments.
Visa has stated that this undertaking represents an extension of the company’s ongoing commitment to leveraging artificial intelligence to drive innovation within the payments sector, generate value for its partners and clients, and facilitate and empower global commerce.
The Generative AI Ventures initiative will be spearheaded by Visa Ventures, Visa’s global corporate investment arm, which proudly boasts a history of investing in and collaborating with forward-thinking companies that are at the forefront of payment and commerce innovation since as far back as 2007.
Generative AI, a cutting-edge branch of artificial intelligence, shares similarities with widely recognised models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It harnesses the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to cultivate artificial general intelligence capable of producing text, images, or various other content based on extensive datasets when provided with prompts.
Commenting on this groundbreaking initiative, Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa Inc., asserted, “While the initial focus of generative AI has primarily revolved around task automation and content generation, this technology is poised to reshape not only our daily lives and work processes but also to fundamentally transform the world of commerce as we know it.”
David Rolf, Head of Visa Ventures, Visa Inc., added, “With the potential of generative AI to become one of the most transformative technologies of our era, we are thrilled to broaden our scope and invest in some of the most pioneering and disruptive startups in the realm of generative AI, commerce, and payments.”
Visa’s announcement aligns with a broader trend of major tech giants displaying a growing interest in the field of artificial intelligence. Just a week ago, Amazon unveiled plans to allocate up to $4 billion in funding to the AI startup Anthropic. In an initial move, Amazon pledged $1.25 billion to secure a minority stake in Anthropic, which, akin to Google’s Bard and OpenAI supported by Microsoft, operates a text-analyzing chatbot fueled by AI. As part of the agreement, Amazon retains the option to further bolster its investment in Anthropic, potentially reaching a total commitment of $4 billion.
Earlier in the year, Microsoft extended its partnership with OpenAI, the creators of the groundbreaking ChatGPT tool. This collaboration was accompanied by a commitment to invest billions of dollars in the AI company. Microsoft had already channelled over $3 billion into OpenAI, underscoring the pivotal role of OpenAI’s technology in Microsoft’s future endeavours and its competitive stance against other tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Apple.