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OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

nytimes.com

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Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#111

Given their current product offerings, I really don't see a way they could ever justify a $300B valuation unless they get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan. I'm calling it now: investors are gonna get burned hard on this one. Cause right now all they have is "well we are working on superintelligence" and to that I say "great, then what?". Even if they do make that breakthrough I don't see h…

> unless they get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan.

that would be a monthly recurring revenue of 200 x 7bn = $1,400,000,000,000 or $1.4tn a month, $16.8tn per year!

I think they've be valued a bit higher than $300bn if that were the case.

Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#112

So OpenAI is running at a $13B ARR, meaning this is a ~23X valuation. I don't have a good read on margin. But this would imply massive growth assumptions which I struggle a bit to understand where they come from. (1) New customers new to AI or migrations from Claude/Perplexity/Google: The overwhelming majority of people already know about the offerings, leaving most new people to come from residual people who identif…

Tech people and their friends are like 1% of the population. Go out on the the street of Anytown in any western country, and people know "ChatGPT". A friend of mine is a teacher, and told me that at a recent school board meeting there was discussion about implementing AI into the learning curriculum. And to the board, "AI" and "ChatGPT" were used interchangeably. There was no discussion of other providers or models,…

Exactly, it's hard to dismiss the broad penetration of ChatGPT in the general population. I was an AI skeptic/luddite until almost exactly a year ago when, in a span of a month or so, I had three different friends/family members who work in various administrative jobs tell me that they all used ChatGPT surreptitiously at work to get things done. Now a year later I don't know many people that don't use it at least occasionally. The ones that don't are older and I'm confident eventually they'll be using it like crazy to annoy me.

Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#113
Personally, my estimate of a rational valuation would be:

$1-2T with no legal risk.

$300B assuming a rational and uncorrupt government, which should, at some point, kick them back to non-profit status, and convict people for fraud

Of course, too-big-to-fail means this won't happen.

Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re going to sell to the military, that’s why they hired the former NSA director into their board. The current state of AI is a perfect mass surveillance technology.

> The current state of AI is a perfect mass surveillance technology. How? Are you just going to ask the LLM about who is doing the crime? OpenAI is not an "AI company", it's an "LLM company".

You do what they're already doing - ask the LLM to summarise someone's entire facebook feed (including all the private stuff they can access) into a few bullet points. Whether it works reliably is a different matter.

Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#117

How much do investors make on average on VC? I mean, OpenAI is hardly a startup. But VC money can't be a one way street forever. So either: - VC invests on the whole sensibly and makes a return that justifies 10-15 year lock-in - VC has somehow changed and is now unsustainable, it is a one way cash flow and it will blow up like MBS did - VC sustainably delivers mediocre returns and gets some money in, some money out,…

I mean it could be the investor knows the company wants to IPO and expects to make quick cash before they go public. Given the size of the company, it could be a short term play where they expect them to IPO at 500B in the next year or two

Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#119

How much do investors make on average on VC? I mean, OpenAI is hardly a startup. But VC money can't be a one way street forever. So either: - VC invests on the whole sensibly and makes a return that justifies 10-15 year lock-in - VC has somehow changed and is now unsustainable, it is a one way cash flow and it will blow up like MBS did - VC sustainably delivers mediocre returns and gets some money in, some money out,…

> make on average

This completely misses the boat on venture capital, which is almost by definition the riskiest of all risky bets. Any smart LP throwing $X into a fund has a portfolio valued, at the very least, at 100 if not 1000 times X. It is simply the way to expose the high-risk portion of the portfolio to that level of risk at the size of the investment needed. Being high-risk, probably it will return nothing. But it might not.

Re: OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

#120

Given their current product offerings, I really don't see a way they could ever justify a $300B valuation unless they get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan. I'm calling it now: investors are gonna get burned hard on this one. Cause right now all they have is "well we are working on superintelligence" and to that I say "great, then what?". Even if they do make that breakthrough I don't see h…

> unless they get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan. that would be a monthly recurring revenue of 200 x 7bn = $1,400,000,000,000 or $1.4tn a month, $16.8tn per year! I think they've be valued a bit higher than $300bn if that were the case.

I think it was hyperbole
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