OpenAI to First Release Open Language Model in Six Years as $40 Billion Fund...

TMTPOST -- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Monday the artificial intelligence (AI) star will have a major launch, its first “open” language model since GPT-2 that was unveiled in February 2019.

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“We are excited to release a powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning in the coming months, and we want to talk to devs about how to make it maimally useful,” said Atman in a post on social media X, attaching a link to a feedback form that OpenAI published on its website.

“We’re planning to release our first open language model since GPT-2 in the coming months. We’re excited to collaborate with developers, researchers, and the broader community to gather inputs and make this model as useful as possible. If you’re interested in joining a feedback session with the OpenAI team, please let us know below,” OpenAI said on the website.

OpenAI will evaluate the model according out its preparedness framework before the release and is going to host developer events to collect feedback and later play with early prototypes, Altman in his post revealed. He said the company will start the developer event in San Francisco in a couple of weeks followed by sessions in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Monday also saw OpenAI completed its largest ever funding round. OpenAI said it has closed a $40 billion funding round with a post-money valuation of $300 billion. That suggests OpenAI’s value almost doubled from the valuation it achieved through a funding in October.

The financing brought OpenAI the world’s second-most valuable private company that has a valuation even with TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd., and just behind SpaceX at $350 billion and among the world’s most richly valued private companies, according to CB Insights.

OpenAI said it the new funding will enable it to “push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.”

CNBC confirmed that the latest funding could be cut by one fourth if the company doesn’t restructure into a for-profit entity by the end of this year. It was said that contribution from SoftBank, the leading investor of the funding round that is set to input $30 billion, will shrink to $20 billion, while other contributions by the remaining syndicate of investors, including Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive, would remain at $10 billion.

The upcoming “open” language model is OpenAI’s latest response to Chinese startup DeepSeek’s explosive tool upends the competition on the AI sector. Altman said in February OpenAI will release GPT-5 in both ChatGPT and its API, and free ChatGPT users will get “unlimited chat access at the standard intelligence setting”, though subject to abuse thresholds.

ChatGPT Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence, according to Altman. He added these models will incorporate voice, canvas, search, deep research, and more,

GPT-5 is a system that will integrate lots of OpenAI’s technologies including o3, the reasoning model that the company previewed in December but has not released yet. OpenAI will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model, Atman said.