OpenAI Raises $40 Billion, Plans to Launch First Open-Weight Model Since GPT-2

OpenAI has announced that it has raised $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation. The company stated that this funding will help push the frontiers of AI research, scale compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.

“We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group—few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do,” the company said in its blog post. 

OpenAI said that the support will help it continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way towards AGI that will benefit all of humanity.

ChatGPT’s new image-generation feature, which gained attention for Ghibli-style creations, has significantly increased user numbers. “The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour,” OpenAI chief Sam Altman wrote on X.

Altman, in another post, also announced plans to release its first open-weight language model since GPT-2 with a focus on reasoning capabilities. The release is expected in the coming months.

He said that the company is inviting developers to provide feedback on how to maximise the model’s utility. It will hold events in San Francisco in the next few weeks, followed by sessions in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Developers can sign up to participate via OpenAI’s website.

“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” Altman said.

Before its launch, the model will be evaluated using OpenAI’s preparedness framework, with additional considerations due to the likelihood of post-release modifications.

Altman expressed interest in how developers, large companies, and governments will use the model, particularly in environments where self-hosting is preferred. “We’re excited to see what developers build,” he said.