Via openai.com
The rumored model would represent OpenAI's first major pretraining milestone since GPT-4o and could serve as a foundation for future AGI-capable systems
OpenAI has reportedly completed a massive new pretraining run codenamed “Bel,” featuring over 10 trillion parameters. If accurate, it would mark the company’s first successful full-scale frontier pretraining since GPT-4o shipped in May 2024.
The claim originated from a post on X by user @synthwavedd on August 25, 2026. OpenAI has not officially confirmed the existence of Bel or released any technical specifications.
What we know about Bel #
According to the unverified reports, Bel follows a prior pretraining run codenamed “Doug” and is intended to serve as a base model for future systems. Those future systems reportedly include something called Astra, as well as successors to GPT-6, with post-training work expected to unlock capabilities that push closer to what the industry calls Artificial General Intelligence.
OpenAI has reportedly struggled with scaling since GPT-4o launched. Multiple sources within the AI research community have pointed to interrupted training runs, safety-related s in reinforcement learning processes, and technical difficulties that stalled progress on larger models. The company’s compute scaling efforts have been discussed under the umbrella of Project Stargate.
Why the gap since GPT-4o matters #
The period between May 2024 and now has been an unusually long stretch for OpenAI to go without shipping a new frontier base model. The company released incremental updates and fine-tuned variants, but the core pretraining hadn’t produced a confirmed successor at a meaningfully larger scale.
During that same window, competitors didn’t sit still. Anthropic pushed forward with its Claude model family, Google DeepMind continued scaling Gemini, and a growing roster of open-source efforts from Meta and others kept closing the gap.
The AGI question and competitive stakes #
The framing around Bel is explicitly tied to AGI ambitions. The reported pipeline—from Bel to Astra to whatever follows GPT-6—suggests OpenAI is thinking in terms of a multi-stage roadmap where each layer of post-training and fine-tuning extracts progressively more capable behavior from the base model.
On the other hand, the cautionary note is straightforward: none of this is confirmed. Until OpenAI provides official validation, whether through a technical paper, a product announcement, or even a casual blog post, Bel remains an unverified claim from a social media post.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our