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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

#161

Post by cactusplant7374 »

amradio1989 wrote: post #147

Pretty insane valuation. It may pay off, it may not. Google search was vastly superior to its competitors. I don't think ChatGPT has that kind of edge. This is a monopoly kind of valuation where no monopoly exists. Its like paying Microsoft billions for Internet explorer. Personally I believe the future of AI models is open-source. The application of these models will be the real revenue driver.

How would an average person even tell if ChatGPT was better than its competitors? Most people aren't running enough prompts every month to even care. Everyone knows ChatGPT and no one knows its competitors. It's going to stay like that.

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

#164

Post by throwawaylaptop »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #70

Sweet VC money fueling the AI hype. Funny enough, my TikTok feed recently started showing videos about how corporate America is going to replace workers with AI. I even came across an interview with Marc Benioff where he said Salesforce will deploy AI to help with engineering.

Who wouldnt deploy AI to help with engineering? The question is, will it help so much that you need fewer engineers, or will you simply be ecstatic that your engineers are now a little or a lot more productive. If you have x engineers, and your competitor has the same x number of engineers.. and you both start using AI, are you going to layoff half your engineers when your competitor doesn't? Unless your cash strapped and also don't have any plans for new development, I suppose yes. But otherwise, it's just another thing you need.

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

#165

Post by matusp »

notfromhere wrote: post #138
zozbot234 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OpenAI has is the know-how in developing new models and training them efficiently. That's a kind of value they can provide even in a world where open-sourced local models are in common use.

Sure but so do like a dozen other companies. Given that models bump past each other every few months, I haven’t seen anything that says they have any kind of competitive advatange.

Considering their budget, their research is a bit underwhelming. At this point, anybody is able to match their models. No technology moat whatsoever despite infinite money glitch.

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

#166

Post by grues-dinner »

peab wrote: post #88
svantana wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan Not necessarily. Google is valued 7x that and most people don't pay them anything. They just make ridiculous money from ads for insurance and loans. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is the #1 app and the #5 website, which should really worry google (and it does by all accounts).

yeah, it's pretty easy to see how openai could steal those high paying queries from Google, if they continue growing at this rate.

I assume the plan is getting AI into everything and making millions of data centipedes that eventually lead back to their APIs.

Then embed ads.

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

#167

Post by piqufoh »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #69
ahmedhawas123 wrote: post #15

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,…

Anecdotally, "skype" was once synonymous with video calls but it's pretty much never used now.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

empath75 wrote: post #65
ahmedhawas123 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I think the question is who will win the domain specific use cases (delivery, not API). Delivery of the agentic workflows is up for anyone to win (players like Perplexity, Lovable, etc) and OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic is in a way only a vendor to that by providing what will become a commoditized function calling API/MCP provider.

Open AI has 10 times the active users of any of it's competitors, including google.

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by eduardofcgo »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #153
lelanthran wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, the $200/m plan is at a loss, they'll make a profit on PAYG tokens, not plans. Secondly, this is looking very risky: they are at the bottom of the value chain and eventually they'll be running on razor thin margins like all actors who are at the bottom of the value chain. Anything they can offer is doable by their competitors (in Google's case, they can even do it cheaper due to ow ing the vertical which Ope…

I feel like being at the bottom of the value chain is a mis-categorization. If you consider base LLM model as their sole offering I agree with you, but these companies have shown an eagerness to eat their way up the value chain. Agent mode, Search, Study Mode, AI code editors, are such examples of products that could be higher-on-the-chain startups but are offered in-house by OpenAI. This reminds me of Amazon choosin…

OpenAI valued at 300B will never be able to produce the same products "wrappers" that these 5 people startups are making. Same reason Facebook could not make Instagram, of Jira could never make bootcamp for example.

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

#170

Post by ac29 »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #78
_fat_santa wrote: post #52

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…

>I'm calling it now: investors are gonna get burned hard on this one. I'm in my late 40s. I'm Gen X. I lived through the glory days of the dotcom boom, when investors got burned for tons of money. But from the ashes of those bullshit companies, we got Amazon, Google, etc., which made investors rich beyond belief. SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son made a bet on Alibaba ($20 million, its stake now worth $72 billion), and he’s b…

> I'm in my late 40s. I'm Gen X. I lived through the glory days of the dotcom boom, when investors got burned for tons of money. But from the ashes of those bullshit companies, we got Amazon, Google, etc., which made investors rich beyond belief.

True, but I think they were talking specifically about the direct investors in OpenAI.

"Investors" writ large will likely continue to have good long term returns (with occasionally significant short term volatility).

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