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OpenAI Eyes $500 Billion Valuation in Potential Employee Share Sale

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OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is reportedly in early talks for a private stock sale that would let employees cash out shares, potentially valuing the company at about $500 billion—up significantly from its current $300 billion valuation. The transaction, which would occur before any initial public offering (IPO), aims to allow current and former employees to sell several billion dollars worth of shares.

The move highlights OpenAI’s rapid growth, driven by its flagship ChatGPT product, which has doubled revenue in the first seven months of 2025 to an annualized run rate of $12 billion, with projections to reach $20 billion by year-end. OpenAI now boasts about 700 million weekly active users, up from 400 million in February.

This potential share sale follows a primary funding round announced earlier this year targeting $40 billion, led by Japan’s SoftBank Group, which is obligated to fund $22.5 billion by year-end. The remaining portion of the round has already been subscribed at the current $300 billion valuation.

Amid fierce competition for AI talent, tech giants like Meta are investing billions in startups such as Scale AI to secure top executives, underscoring the high stakes in the AI race. Other private companies like ByteDance and Databricks have similarly used private share sales to refresh valuations and reward employees.

Existing OpenAI investors, including Thrive Capital, are reportedly considering participation in the employee share sale. Thrive Capital declined to comment.

OpenAI is also planning a significant corporate restructuring to move away from its capped-profit model, paving the way for a potential future IPO. However, CFO Sarah Friar emphasized that any public offering would only occur when both the company and market conditions are favorable.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 Model Nears Release Amid High Expectations

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OpenAI is on the brink of releasing GPT-5, the next-generation language model succeeding GPT-4, which powered the ChatGPT phenomenon starting in 2022. Industry insiders and early testers express cautious optimism, praising its enhanced coding and scientific problem-solving capabilities, though some say the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 feels less dramatic compared to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft and currently valued at around $300 billion, has faced challenges scaling GPT-5 due to limitations in available training data and increased complexity in training runs that can last months and are prone to hardware failures. Unlike GPT-4, which saw significant gains through increased compute power and data, GPT-5 incorporates a novel approach called “test-time compute,” directing extra processing power dynamically to solve complex reasoning and decision-making tasks.

Since the debut of ChatGPT nearly three years ago, generative AI has rapidly advanced. GPT-4 notably outperformed its predecessor by passing the simulated bar exam in the top 10%, setting a new standard in AI capabilities. Meanwhile, competitors like Google and Anthropic have developed rival models, and open-source initiatives such as Meta’s Llama 3 have narrowed the performance gap.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted earlier in 2025 that GPT-5 would blend traditional large model training with test-time compute techniques, reflecting the company’s increasingly sophisticated and multifaceted AI portfolio. The broader AI industry awaits the release with anticipation, expecting GPT-5 to unlock new applications beyond conversational AI toward fully autonomous task execution.

OpenAI Launches Open-Weight Reasoning Models Optimized for Laptop Use

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OpenAI announced on Tuesday the release of two open-weight language models designed for advanced reasoning tasks and optimized to run efficiently on laptops, delivering performance comparable to its smaller proprietary reasoning models. Unlike fully open-source models, open-weight models provide publicly accessible trained parameters (weights) but do not include full source code or training data, allowing developers to run and fine-tune them locally or behind their own firewalls.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman highlighted that the ability to operate these models locally offers users greater control over security and infrastructure. The two models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, differ in size: the larger model runs on a single GPU, while the smaller one can run directly on personal computers. Both excel at coding, competitive mathematics, and health-related questions, having been trained on text-focused datasets with an emphasis on science and math.

Separately, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that OpenAI’s open-weight models are now available on its Bedrock generative AI marketplace—a first for OpenAI on the platform. Bedrock director Atul Deo praised the models as strong open-weight options for AWS customers.

This launch marks OpenAI’s first release of open models since GPT-2 in 2019, entering a competitive landscape that includes Meta’s Llama series and China’s DeepSeek-R1, both of which have influenced open-weight and open-source AI development trajectories this year.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft and valued at around $300 billion, is currently seeking to raise up to $40 billion in a funding round led by Softbank Group.