$852 billion. That's OpenAI's post-money valuation after closing a $122 billion funding round, making it worth more than most Fortune 100 companies. ChatGPT is the most recognized AI brand among consumers. An IPO is reportedly planned for later this year.
And yet the company that produced those numbers looks quite different from the one that launched ChatGPT in late 2022. The past two years have brought a steady stream of high-profile departures - not peripheral contributors but the people who shaped what OpenAI is: Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and chief scientist, left in May 2024. Mira Murati, the CTO, left in September 2024. John Schulman, co-founder and head of alignment research, departed for Anthropic in August 2024. Greg Brockman, the other co-founder, took an extended leave. Multiple members of the safety team have also exited.
These aren't coincidental exits. They map directly to a shift in what OpenAI is now optimizing for.
From Research Lab to Revenue Machine
OpenAI started as a nonprofit with a stated mission to build safe artificial general intelligence for humanity. Today it's a standard for-profit company - the unusual capped-profit structure it used for years was converted in late 2024 after significant controversy, including a lawsuit from co-founder Elon Musk and public criticism from researchers who had bet their careers on the original mission.
The financial logic for converting is straightforward: building frontier AI systems costs tens of billions of dollars, and you cannot raise that as a nonprofit. The $122 billion round - which includes Microsoft, SoftBank, and others - comes with return expectations that a research mission statement cannot satisfy.
But the conversion changed who stays. Researchers who joined to work on AI safety at below-market salaries, because they believed they were doing something historically important, now work at a company that looks structurally more like Google or Meta than the institution they signed up for.
What an IPO Actually Requires
A public offering would sharpen these tensions. Public markets want predictable revenue growth, expanding margins, and a clear competitive advantage. They do not reward "we're being careful" as a differentiator. OpenAI would need to explain to investors how it maintains its lead as Google, Anthropic, Meta, and a dozen other well-capitalized competitors close the gap on model quality.
The consumer brand is a real asset. ChatGPT's name recognition is genuine and durable in a way that "the AI from Google" is not. But brand loyalty in AI is fragile when the product differences between services are hard for most users to perceive.
The funding numbers and the IPO path make perfect sense from a financial engineering perspective. The internal unease - the departures, the restructuring, the cultural shift toward commercial execution - is what happens when a company built by people who thought they were changing history starts to look like any other large tech company. The valuation is proof it worked. What it cost to get there is a different story.