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OpenAI may be building up to one of the largest initial public offerings ever, but CEO Sam Altman says he is not necessarily looking forward to helming a public company.<\/p>\n
\u201cAm I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%,\u201d Altman said in an episode of the \u201cBig Technology Podcast\u201d published on Thursday. \u201cAm I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it\u2019d be really annoying.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an IPO, with a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal<\/em> putting early talks of a valuation at $830 billion. In a more lofty estimate, the company could be valued at up to $1 trillion, Reuters<\/em> reported in October, citing three sources. According to the Reuters <\/em>report, chief financial officer Sarah Friar is eyeing a 2027 listing, with a potential IPO filing in late 2026.<\/p>\n Altman told \u201cBig Technology\u201d he didn\u2019t know if his AI company would go public next year and was mum on details about fundraising, or the company\u2019s valuation. OpenAI did not respond to Fortune<\/em>\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n Despite his hesitance to lead a public company\u2014which are often under more scrutiny, greater regulatory oversight, and are associated with less influence from founders\u2014OpenAI\u2019s IPO wouldn\u2019t be all bad, Altman noted.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI do think it\u2019s cool that public markets get to participate in value creation,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd in some sense, we will be very late to go public if you look at any previous company. It\u2019s wonderful to be a private company. We need lots of capital. We\u2019re going to cross all of the shareholder limits and stuff at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n An IPO would pave the way for OpenAI to raise the billions of dollars needed to compete in the AI race. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015, OpenAI just completed a complex restructuring in October that converted it into a more traditional for-profit company, giving the nonprofit controlling the company a $130 billion stake in it. The restructuring also gave Microsoft a reduced 27% stake in the company, as well as increased research access, while simultaneously freeing up OpenAI to make deals with other cloud-computing partners.\u00a0<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s urgency to compete with rivals was apparent earlier this month when Altman declared a \u201ccode red\u201d in an internal memo, following the surge of interest after Google rolled out its new Gemini 3 model in just one day, which the company said was the fastest deployment of a model into Google Search. Altman\u2019s \u201ccode red\u201d was an eight-week mandate to redouble OpenAI\u2019s own efforts while temporarily postponing other initiatives, such as advertising and expanding e-commerce offerings.<\/p>\n The blitz appears to be paying off: Last week, OpenAI launched its new GPT-5.2 model, and earlier this week, it released a new image-generation model to compete with Google\u2019s Nano Banana. Fidji Simo, OpenAI\u2019s CEO of applications, said the update wasn\u2019t in response to Google\u2019s Gemini 3, but that the extra resources from the code red did help expedite its debut.<\/p>\n As OpenAI tries to address slowing user growth and retain and grow market share from its competitors, Altman conceded a code red will not be a one-off phenomenon. The all-out effort is a model that\u2019s been employed by Google, and also Meta through Facebook\u2019s more extreme \u201clockdown\u201d periods. He downplayed the stakes of a code red, matching what sources told Fortune<\/em> <\/em>equated to a focused, but not panicked, office environment.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that it\u2019s good to be paranoid and act quickly when a potential competitive threat emerges,\u201d Altman said. \u201cThis happened to us in the past. That happened earlier this year with DeepSeek. And there was a code red back then, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Altman likened the urgency of a code red to the beginning of a pandemic, where action taken at the beginning, more so than actions taken later, have an outsized impact on an outcome. He expected code reds will be a norm as the company hopes to gain distance from the likes of Google and DeepSeek.<\/p>\n \u201cMy guess is we\u2019ll be doing these once, maybe twice a year, for a long time, and that\u2019s part of really just making sure that we win in our space,\u201d Altman said. \u201cA lot of other companies will do great too, and I\u2019m happy for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Sam #Altman #hes #excited #running #public #company #OpenAI #preps #IPO<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OpenAI may be building up to o… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5216,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[4845,596,4846,701,798,2221,703,4847,2018,3349,4844,2787],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}More \u2018code reds\u2019 to come<\/strong><\/h2>\n