OpenAI banks $11 billion, but at a lower price than it wanted
OpenAI has closed roughly $11 billion, the first portion of a new round that values it at $1.25 trillion, Bloomberg reports. The money was wired on Friday, and the round could reach about $20 billion in the coming weeks. That is well short of the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion OpenAI was reportedly chasing in September, before a sell-off in public AI stocks cooled investor appetite. The scaled-back round still extends OpenAI's runway after it delayed its IPO, but it shows that even the biggest lab now has to price for a more sceptical market, which matters for Anthropic's own reported listing plans and for every later-stage AI raise that benchmarks against these valuations.
What else matters
Thinking Machines ships Inkling 2 Small, with open weights promised next week
Mira Murati's lab released Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594B total and 17B active parameters, image input and variable effort. It is available on Tinker now with closed weights, and the lab says full Apache 2.0 weights follow next week once external safety testing and red-teaming are done.
Tencent's Hy4 adds vision and computer use
Tencent launched Hy4, its first model with visual understanding and computer use across command-line and graphical apps, trained on tools like Blender and CAD. Pricing stays at about $0.90 per million input tokens, and Tencent says open weights and system cards arrive in the coming days.
Flower's Endeavor 1.1 offers frontier-class models with EU inference
Flower Labs released Endeavor 1.1, adding image input, stronger reasoning and an option to run inference on GPUs located in the EU. Customers keep ownership of outputs and readable thinking traces, and can deploy it managed, in a private cloud or on premises.
