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OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation

nytimes.com

221–230 of 294 posts

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

#221

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…

Made a lot off ARM and Uber.

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

#222
post #209

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…

OpenAI will never be profitable selling raw tokens. They need the application layer that allows them to sell additional functionality and decouple the cost of a plan from the cost of tokens. See Lovable, they abstract away tokens as "credits" and most likely sell the tokens at a ~10x markup. The idea of running a company that sells tokens is like starting a company that sells MySQL calls.

> The idea of running a company that sells tokens is like starting a company that sells MySQL calls.

I think DynamoDB is plenty profitable :)

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

#223
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVDAs valuation is insane. At 30X revenue, they could double sales and reduce expenses to zero and they'd still need a story about future growth to justify the valuation. Consider this: Nvidia doesn't do the manufacturing, just the engineering. If we had AI super intelligence, you'd just need to type "give me CUDA but for AMD" into chatGPT and Nvidia wouldn't be special anymore. Then someone at TSMC could type "desig…

Super intelligence doesn't make it real it just knows how. You can't type "bring me a moon rock" to it.

You obviously don't work with the people I work with. They're a lot more convinced that OP's version of reality is coming than yours. Convinced.

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

#225

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…

If the make that breakthrough, they are woefully undervalued.

How can you downplay the economic significance of that?!?

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

#226

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…

The real revenue opportunity for OpenAI is advertising. More than 25% of Americans use ChatGPT instead of Google, and OpenAI has already announced partnership with Shopify to directly list products. But for now they are focused on market share. Google does not really own the complete AI stack, NVDA is extracting a lot of the value there. Google has two other impediments to doing what ChatGPT does. Googles entire busi…

Many people have a lot of context built up with ChatGPT. I know people who refuse to try Anthropic because it "doesn't know them as well" & can't answer their questions.

HN views this as negative but many people see this as a positive.

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

#227
post #171

It's so funny. Every single time a company raises a ton of money at a large valuation, the comments are always filled with "how do they justify this valuation" or "they aren't work X...because Y and Z do the same thing". VC math is pretty simple - at the end of the day, there's a pretty large likelihood that at least 1 AI company is going to reach a trillion dollar valuation. VCs want to find that company. OpenAI, wh…

Doubling your money in 10 years is < 7.2% per year compounded. With the risks involved here, I wouldn’t take that bet. There are safer assets that would return that much.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…. Does anyone actually use Threads? I’ve never once seen a threads link and I understood the user count was just because every facebook or IG or whatever user automatically got a generated account?

I have also never seen a Threads link. For all the hatred of X, people do actually use it.

75% of Twitter users are bots now, some I'm sure are real people.

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

#229

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…

The real revenue opportunity for OpenAI is advertising. More than 25% of Americans use ChatGPT instead of Google, and OpenAI has already announced partnership with Shopify to directly list products. But for now they are focused on market share. Google does not really own the complete AI stack, NVDA is extracting a lot of the value there. Google has two other impediments to doing what ChatGPT does. Googles entire busi…

Except Google search keeps growing per their last earnings report. You'd think if 25% of Americans have switched to ChatGPT it would have hit the numbers by now...

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

#230

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…

Ads. They're going to sell ads. It's a bit hard to imagine how else they justify the valuation.

Even if people look for answers from ChatGPT instead of Google, most people still won't pay $20/mo for it, let alone $200/mo. Average people don't pay for Google search and I've never seen any sign telling they would be willing to pay for it.

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