In a sure signal that Silicon Valley investors are all in on AI, reported investor talks could value OpenAI at $500bn, overtaking Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the most valuable privately-held tech company in the world.
If reports are true that OpenAI’s next round of investment will value it at $500bn, then AI has truly taken over as the venture capital darling in Silicon Valley. Many will question whether an AI software company can really have that intrinsic value, but OpenAI is pushing the boundaries as investors pile in on the AI boom.
Sources have told Bloomberg that existing investors that include Thrive Capital have approached the company about buying back some former and existing employee shares, a so called secondary stock sale in the billions.
It would be an almost unprecedented rise in value in such a short space of time. OpenAI had recently been valued at $300bn after the Softbank-led financing round of $40bn in March of this year. For those of us who were around for the infamous dot come bubble, alarms might ring, but there is no question that OpenAI has stolen the march when it comes to widespread use of the technology, with ChatGPT becoming synonymous with everyday generative AI use, despite a highly competitive market.
OpenAI doubled its revenue in the first seven months of the year, reaching an annualised run rate of $12bn, and is on track to reach $20bn by the end of 2025, a source told Reuters. The Microsoft-backed start-up is estimated to have some 700m weekly active users for its ChatGPT products – up from 400m in February.
OpenAI goes Open
Yesterday OpenAI announced its first two open AI reasoning models, to compete with China’s Deepseek and Moonshot releases, among others. These open models allow the software to run on local hardware should an organisation desire, and one of the models can even run on a laptop, requiring just 16GB.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman had announced just last month (July) that its first open-source model would be delayed indefinitely for safety reasons. And Chinese Alibaba-backed start-up Moonshot launched its new open-source AI model onto the market in the shape of Kimi 2, hoping to take on DeepSeek and other local Chinese rivals – as well as it’s US counterparts.
The two new models, GPT-oss-120b and GPT-oss-20b, will be made available to download on Hugging Face and focus on text and coding, rather than images or videos for now.
“The weights for both gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b are freely available for download on Hugging Face and come natively quantized in MXFP4,” said OpenAI. “This allows for the gpt-oss-120B model to run within 80GB of memory, while gpt-oss-20b only requires 16GB.”
“A healthy open model ecosystem is one dimension to helping make AI widely accessible and beneficial for everyone,” OpenAI said in its launch post. “We invite developers and researchers to use these models to experiment, collaborate and push the boundaries of what’s possible.”
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