Funding Pending, Buzzwords Imminent: Our Draft Press Release for OpenAI’s Inevitable $40B Round

Reports are swirling that OpenAI, the company responsible for making your job obsolete, is about to close a SoftBank-led funding round worth approximately $40 billion. Somewhere deep within the GPT-powered bowels of OpenAI HQ, a valiant PR team is no doubt gathering every piece of corporate jargon, trend-chasing acronym, and triumphant chest-thump they can muster to mark the occasion.

But I’ll be honest: I’m concerned. Concerned that the official press release won’t quite capture the soul-stirring, paradigm-disrupting grandeur of this moment. What if it doesn’t reference AGI enough? What if it forgets to call something “transformational”? What if it fails to say “democratizing intelligence at scale”?

Lucky for them, I’ve taken the liberty of drafting a press release that I think is worthy of the moment. And in the spirit of OpenAI’s famously fluid relationship with copyright, I hereby donate it to them, gratis. No need to credit me — just pay it forward in GPU time.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OpenAI Secures $40 Billion in SoftBank-Led Funding Round to Boldly Monetize the Future of Humanity

OpenAI, the world’s leading artisanal intelligence boutique, is thrilled to announce that it has closed a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, with participation from a rotating cast of sovereign wealth funds and visionary billionaires.

This landmark raise solidifies OpenAI’s position as the undisputed heavyweight champion of AI press releases and a top contender in the “Most Money Raised While Saying ‘Safety’ in Every Sentence” category.

“This funding is a validation of our relentless commitment to build artificial general intelligence that is safe, beneficial, and slightly unnerving,” said Sam Altman, CEO and aspiring techno-oracle. “We remain laser-focused on our mission to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity, with a strong preference for those who can pay our enterprise licensing fees.”

The $40 billion will be deployed across several transformative initiatives, including:

• Expanding GPT-X (name TBD), our next-generation model that will read your mind and then upsell you on it.
• Accelerating our “AI for Everything” strategy, including AI therapists, AI founders, and AI publicists.
• Hiring more researchers who will tweet cryptically about consciousness.
• Continuing our bold experiments in the open-source-not-open-source licensing space.

Masayoshi Son, Founder and CEO of SoftBank, commented: “When I saw OpenAI’s revenue growth, I immediately thought, ‘This is it. This is the singularity—of ARR.’”

OpenAI’s latest round places the company’s valuation somewhere between “lol” and “are you serious,” firmly cementing its role as both a technological pioneer and a liquidity event in progress.

“This is not just a raise,” said Mira Murati, CTO and buzzword whisperer. “It’s a testament to the indomitable spirit of human ambition, exponential scaling, and compute-intensive hope.”

The company remains committed to its core values: scaling safely, deploying responsibly, and issuing statements that sound vaguely utopian until you read the fine print.