TAG

# OpenAI

2026-07-19

The Woman Who Built ChatGPT Just Shipped a Model She Admits Isn't the Strongest — and Investors Are About to Value Her at $50 Billion

Yesterday Kimi K3 was still shouting "topped the charts, number one in the world." Today the woman who built ChatGPT did the exact opposite. On July 16, Mira Murati's Thinking Machines released Inkling — a 975B open-weights model, natively multimodal, with adjustable thinking effort — yet in black and white the announcement says it is "not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed." Meanwhile this company, just a year and a half old, is raising a new round at roughly a $50 billion valuation — four times last July's. Why is someone who shipped a model that isn't the strongest worth $50 billion? The answer hides in the thing she's best at, and the most expensive thing in the AI era: judging what actually makes a good product.

2026-07-10

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 4 | Sam Altman: His Real Product Was Never ChatGPT — It's OpenAI Itself

No. 4 on the list is Sam Altman, OVR 96 — but the lowest of his six dimensions is taste, just 87. That's not a knock on him; it's the key to understanding him. This week he wasn't busy with product: he admitted to CNBC that OpenAI made "a lot of changes" with the White House to ship GPT-5.6, was reported to have offered a U.S. sovereign fund 5% of the company, and published a pitch for an "American-led international AI forum." A consumer product company's CEO, spending a week on the Treasury Secretary — because the product he's actually running was never that chat box. It's where the three letters O-P-E-N-A-I sit in the world. This piece breaks down his six scores, and the bet the numbers are now testing.