# OpenAI reportedly completes pretraining run ‘Bel’ with over 10 trillion parameters > Source: > Published: 2026-08-25 19:13:57+00:00 Via openai.com # OpenAI reportedly completes pretraining run ‘Bel’ with over 10 trillion parameters 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 pauses 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 [Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).