OpenAI has made headlines once again.

On October 2nd, according to sources familiar with the matter, artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI has completed a share transfer transaction worth approximately $6.6 billion, bringing the company's valuation to $500 billion (approximately 35.6 trillion yuan).

This achievement positions OpenAI ahead of Elon Musk's SpaceX, making it the world's most valuable startup company.

Under the transaction arrangement, current and former OpenAI employees sold portions of their shares to a group of investors, including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi MGX, and T. Rowe Price.

Previous reports had indicated that OpenAI would expand its stock sale by over $4 billion, reaching approximately $10.3 billion. According to sources, the final share sale amount was ultimately below the $10 billion threshold, signaling employee confidence in the company's long-term development prospects.

OpenAI and representatives from several participating investment companies have not yet provided comments.

Currently, OpenAI faces intense talent and technology competition. Meta has recently made aggressive moves to recruit talent from top laboratories including OpenAI, assembling a superintelligence team and reportedly offering compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Technology companies like SpaceX and Stripe have previously conducted secondary stock sales to help employees realize partial gains. In November last year, OpenAI allowed employees to sell approximately $1.5 billion worth of stock through SoftBank's equity acquisition offer. OpenAI also announced a $1.5 million bonus for all employees (including new hires) to stabilize the core team and retain top talent.

Meanwhile, former OpenAI executives have also become formidable competitors.

On September 30th local time, OpenAI officially released its latest flagship video and audio generation model Sora 2, along with the Sora App powered by Sora 2.

On October 1st local time, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and joined by former OpenAI Vice President of Safety Research, released its first product Tinker. This flexible API allows researchers and developers to independently control algorithms and data for fine-tuning language models, enabling seamless transitions from small to large models by changing just one string in Python code.

Prior to this product launch, Thinking Machines Lab attracted competitive investments from giants including AMD and NVIDIA, recently completing a $2 billion seed funding round with a valuation of $12 billion.

Additionally, SSI (Safe Superintelligence), founded by OpenAI co-founder and former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, which has yet to release any products, was reported earlier this year to be seeking a valuation exceeding $20 billion in its new funding round.

Currently, approximately 700 million people use ChatGPT weekly. Benefiting from ChatGPT's robust growth, OpenAI expects ChatGPT to generate approximately $10 billion in revenue this year, with total revenue projected to reach $13 billion. According to previous reports, OpenAI announced first-half revenue of $4.3 billion, representing a 16% increase from 2024's full-year revenue, with monthly income exceeding $1 billion.

Simultaneously, OpenAI consumed $2.5 billion in the same period, primarily due to AI research and development costs and ChatGPT operational expenses, with full-year consumption projected at $8.5 billion.

Previously, OpenAI raised its 2030 revenue forecast by approximately 15%. Based on the previous projection of $174 billion, the adjusted annual revenue will exceed $200 billion.

OpenAI recently announced signing a letter of intent and reaching strategic cooperation with NVIDIA. OpenAI will be able to use NVIDIA systems (meaning millions of GPUs) to build and deploy at least 10GW (gigawatts) of AI data centers for training and running next-generation models. NVIDIA also plans to gradually invest $100 billion in OpenAI.