371–380 of 1001 posts
That is an insane amount to hire Johnny Ive. Just to signal to the market that OpenAI is getting into hardware, what on earth could they be building towards. They’ve been writing some big checks off late, these costs will have to be justified soon enough.
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
Just to stem pointless debates before they flame up - both these acquisitions appear to be primarily if not exclusively for stock. Sure, if you want to get into theoretical finance, OpenAI could have sold these new shares for cash, so technically there's no difference, but OpenAI is only spending opportunity cost cash, rather than fiat. OpenAI's fiat likely still goes to the things you'd expect, like training models…
No question that Ive is a legend, but I do think the fall of Humane (also ex-Apple) and the challenges at Meta, Apple, and Google in terms of VR/AR adoption (Meta Ray Ban, Apple Vision, Google Glasses and the new thing) are instructive here. The $6.5B almost feels like the largest ever aquihire.
Ives + Altman is perceived as a viable successor to the Ives + Jobs partnership that made Apple successful.
Apple is weak and doesn't seem capable of innovating anymore, nor do they seem to understand how to build AI into products.
There's an opportunity to build an Apple-sized hardware wearables company with AI at its core, just as Altman built ChatGPT and disrupted the Google-sized search.
"Apple-sized" more than justifies a 5B valuation.
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This still means 1.5B were paid in cash for a company from what I understood has neither clients nor even a product. Not exactly pocket money.
Appears from the outside as a very expensive aquihire but if you're getting the guy who essentially created the iPhone it could be worth it.
tbh has jony ive produced any remarkable hardware piece since he left apple? Can't think of any maybe im wrong he must be buying the name or something or just the brains idk
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What else are they going to do with all that money? Raise billions and billions under the guise of AGI coming tomorrow and they just become a too big to fail company gobbling up any competition. You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?
> You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we? Apart from, y'know, DeepMind - remember those guys? The ones with the SOTA models at the top of the leaderboards? The ones who just launched Veo3 and blew everyone away? It feels like OpenAI has kinda jumped-the-shark at this stage. They don't seem to be especially competitive any more, and all the news coming out of them is tinkering at the edges or acquisitions tha…
It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle. What has that company been doing to be worth 6.5 billion?