Musk denied it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1943795272515301624 > These rumors are false. xAI is not seeking funding right now. We have plenty of capital.
Yeah well plenty of capital until Tesler shares shed another 20%
XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#22[flagged]
your username fits.
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#23[flagged]
That is an interesting idea.
Nazi in charge is a huge detriment IMO.
Shaming those who profit off Nazi ideology seems wise for USA.
For operating in Germany I'd imagine this would be a more difficult sell, a German branch of it, I wonder if it would be restricted based upon the Nazi behavior of Musk.
(Child of Musk commented how it was definitely a Nazi salute)
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, I don’t think investors really internalize that LLM companies have effectively zero moat. Customers can easily jump ship. Everyone is using effectively the same compute, nearly identical training data, very similar algorithms, etc. Worse past investments in a model become outdated quickly.
I think Hacker News readers underestimate how sticky the typical customer is. The average subscriber to these services isn’t following a constant stream of LLM news and jumping from platform to platform every time the leaderboard changes slightly. The average customer signs up and then inertia and familiarity take over. They stay signed and comfortable.
Doesn't that suggest a 200B valuation in xAI is stupid, though? Nobody is using Grok except Elon's fanboys, where do they imagine these sticky customers are going to come from?
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#25I find it odd that investors are still so motivated to drop money into AI, specifically LLMs, not because I don't see value in the technology, I do, but because it feels to me like it only takes a few months (if that) for your company which might currently dominate with the leading product, to be left behind by someone else who just came out with a better, cheaper, and faster product. I guess this is true for most te…
Microsoft really put this notion under a spotlight with how they deal with LLMs in VSCode Copilot. The LLMs are just a drop-down menu that you can switch between at any moment, on a whim. They all plug into the same toolchains and are essentially generic commodities. They have slightly different prices for usage but that's about it, their outputs aren't wildly different. On topic for this post: it's very telling that Grok models aren't available in Copilot and nobody cares.
I think this arrangement is probably the future of LLM usage, and it does not bode well for everyone betting the farm that their model will be special.
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#26Musk denied it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1943795272515301624 > These rumors are false. xAI is not seeking funding right now. We have plenty of capital.
It's so hard to decide who to believe in this dispute. FT with multiple sources; or, a guy who's committed securities fraud in the past lying about this exact subject matter.
But he might be right? They are not seeking funding right now. So maybe tomorrow?
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#27I find it odd that investors are still so motivated to drop money into AI, specifically LLMs, not because I don't see value in the technology, I do, but because it feels to me like it only takes a few months (if that) for your company which might currently dominate with the leading product, to be left behind by someone else who just came out with a better, cheaper, and faster product. I guess this is true for most te…
My top suspicion is that xAI’s valuation is more about moving money around and less about belief in the actual underlying xAI projects.
I always think of any of these “invest in Elon” projects as a way to curry favor by helping him bail out bad investments with new ones.
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#28I find it odd that investors are still so motivated to drop money into AI, specifically LLMs, not because I don't see value in the technology, I do, but because it feels to me like it only takes a few months (if that) for your company which might currently dominate with the leading product, to be left behind by someone else who just came out with a better, cheaper, and faster product. I guess this is true for most te…
Microsoft really put this notion under a spotlight with how they deal with LLMs in VSCode Copilot. The LLMs are just a drop-down menu that you can switch between at any moment, on a whim. They all plug into the same toolchains and are essentially generic commodities. They have slightly different prices for usage but that's about it, their outputs aren't wildly different. On topic for this post: it's very telling that…
It's the same with DuckDuckGo's search and Cursor, the models are interchangeable and there's no "walled garden", none of them can assert any control or restrictions on others, it's a strict meritocracy.
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#29I find it odd that investors are still so motivated to drop money into AI, specifically LLMs, not because I don't see value in the technology, I do, but because it feels to me like it only takes a few months (if that) for your company which might currently dominate with the leading product, to be left behind by someone else who just came out with a better, cheaper, and faster product. I guess this is true for most te…
Say you're trying to value a 1% stake in a leading AI company. You use a standard "expected value" formula to calculate the current value of the investment opportunity. For each possible outcome, you take the dollar value of that outcome, multiply it times the likelihood of the outcome, then sum the values of all possible outcomes. With this type of calculation, possible outcomes which are very unlikely can still be extremely valuable if the dollar value of that outcome is high enough to compensate for the low probability of success.
Now imagine you believe that this AI company might eventually deliver AGI, or even a Kurzweilian superintelligence. It would be easy to justify a near-infinite dollar value on that best-case outcome. And, of course, a possible outcome with infinite value confers infinite value on the investment as a whole, as long as its value is non-zero.
Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising
#30I find it odd that investors are still so motivated to drop money into AI, specifically LLMs, not because I don't see value in the technology, I do, but because it feels to me like it only takes a few months (if that) for your company which might currently dominate with the leading product, to be left behind by someone else who just came out with a better, cheaper, and faster product. I guess this is true for most te…
Yea, I don’t think investors really internalize that LLM companies have effectively zero moat. Customers can easily jump ship. Everyone is using effectively the same compute, nearly identical training data, very similar algorithms, etc. Worse past investments in a model become outdated quickly.
Memory for end users, large gpu data centers, power plants and contracts to power them, and large amount of synthetic training data are the moat.
OpenAI also announced their own web browser too.