To judge by his social feeds, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a very happy camper, as his company notches one eye-popping success after another. The startup he cofounded in 2015 just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation, the biggest funding round ever by a private tech company; everyone on the internet seems to be posting Studio Ghibli–style images courtesy of OpenAI’s new GPT-4o image-generation model; and ChatGPT now has 500 million weekly users, up from 400 million last month.
And yet, along with all this good news, Altman revealed Monday that OpenAI is making what appears to be a pretty big about-face in its strategy: In several months, Altman said, OpenAI will be releasing an open-source model.
