Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
OpenAI hits $500B valuation
OpenAI employees are selling $6 billion in stock at a $500 billion valuation to SoftBank and other investors, up from $300 billion earlier this year. Meanwhile, ChatGPT's mobile app hit $2 billion in revenue and now earns $193 million a month.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Top Stories
TechCrunch
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn says his controversial 'AI-first' memo was misunderstood, emphasizing the company hasn't laid off full-time employees and remains committed to AI innovation.
Reuters
OpenAI is preparing to sell $6 billion in employee stock at a $500 billion valuation to investors including SoftBank and Thrive Capital, marking another milestone in the AI company's rapid growth since launching ChatGPT.
TechCrunch
ChatGPT's mobile app hit $2B in revenue since 2023, earning $193M monthly and dominating the AI mobile market with 30x more spending than competitors combined.
Bloomberg
OpenAI employees are selling $6 billion in shares at a $500 billion valuation to investors led by SoftBank, addressing talent retention amid fierce competition while making OpenAI the world's most valuable startup. The move comes as the company projects tripling revenue to $12.7 billion and plans massive infrastructure investments.
The Verge
Grammarly launched nine AI agents for students and educators, including a grader that predicts paper scores and tools for plagiarism detection and citation generation.
Keep Reading
Industry Voices
Jeff Dean
Chief Scientist at Google
Built TensorFlow and Google Brain—if he's working on something, it'll be infrastructure that runs half the internet's AI in three years.
Mark Chen
Chief Research Officer at OpenAI
Led the Codex team that turned GPT into a programmer, now steering OpenAI's research direction beyond language into multimodal reasoning.
Chad Nelson
Creative Specialist at OpenAI
Translates cutting-edge AI capabilities into actual creative workflows, showing what's possible before the rest of us figure out the prompts.
Aditya Challapally
Lead Author and Research Contributor at MIT NANDA
Pushing AI applications in healthcare diagnostics at MIT, where research actually becomes clinical tools instead of staying in papers.
Martin A. Makary
Commissioner at FDA
Determines which AI medical devices actually make it to market—he's the gatekeeper between algorithms and your doctor's office.
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