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OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

techcrunch.com

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Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#311

Post by hogwasher »

131hn wrote: post #262
muddi900 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it is the other way around; every upstart claims that their invention is the mostest revolutionariest thing ever. 99.9% of them are not. The nay sayers are right most of the time. Recent high-profile examples include Segway, NFT, Crypto as a whole, pre-tranformers voice assistants and various "Design Thinking" projects like those Amazon prime buttons.

My grandma (and my parents, by the way) have never heard of Segway, NFTs, or crypto, but they use ChatGPT all the time.

And your grandma and parents pay for it, do they?

Free ChatGPT chat has made the company a household name, and helped it to persuade investors, but every single one of those free users costs the company money. Most of those free users have proved unwilling to convert to paid users, and adding ads to the free service promises to send it into the same enshittification death spiral so many other companies have fallen into.

Also, how on Earth would your grandma and parents not have heard of crypto? Crypto is frequently front page news, even in print newspapers. There have been crypto superbowl ads. Are they living under a rock?

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#312

Post by bigfishrunning »

echelon wrote: post #240
Netcob wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once they "reach AGI", will they have a big party on a carrier with a "Mission Accomplished" banner?

[flagged]

> 20kloc of Rust code every day (and I review all of it).

Reviewing 1k lines of code an hour is a breakneck pace, are you spending 20 hours a day reviewing code?

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#313

Post by nradov »

babelfish wrote: post #297
DauntingPear7 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will they make money on their product exactly? To the tune of being worth nearly a trillion dollars? There is no guarantee that inference will go down, we’ve seen some improvement with cheap models, but they aren’t what people want, and otherwise models stay expensive to run and use

Inference is already profitable (training is not)

So what. In a highly competitive industry they can't keep selling inference unless they continually train better models. It's like saying my airline is profitable if you don't count the cost of buying new airplanes.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#314

Post by hk__2 »

mountainriver wrote: post #290
loeber wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing OpenAI and WeWork is a nonsensical perspective. OpenAI is shipping the most revolutionary product in a generation, with 800 million monthly active users. It's the fastest revenue ramp ever, at incredible scale -- $20B+ ARR. These are real fundamentals. They matter. And the cost of inference is coming down all the time. WeWork was a short-term/long-term lease arbitrage business. The two are nothing alike.

It’s one of the worst takes I’ve heard. OpenAI creates the fastest growing app ever, spawns a revolution bigger than the internet, and this guys take is they are like WeWork…

Being the first doesn’t mean you’ll win. They have no product, only a commodity that you can find at other companies or even for free (DeepSeek).

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#315

Post by zmmmmm »

tosh wrote: post #5

> We continue to have a great relationship with Microsoft. Our stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure, and we will build out much more capacity with them. This sounds a bit like going forward (some) OpenAI APIs will also run on platforms other than Azure (AWS)? Anyone knows more?

Curious what is meant by "stateless".

OpenAI desperately needs to be available outside Azure. We are exclusively using Anthropic atm because it is what is available in AWS Bedrock and it works. These things are solidifying fast.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#316

Post by xvector »

whimsicalism wrote: post #291
holografix wrote: post #278

Is OpenAI giving employees RSUs? What good are those under these astronomical valuations?

they have PPUs

No it's RSU now. But idk if anyone would want to join OpenAI at these levels. Are they really a $1T business?

At least Anthropic has some runway in terms of valuation and isn't bleeding all over some free tier.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#317

Post by rvnx »

hk__2 wrote: post #314
mountainriver wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s one of the worst takes I’ve heard. OpenAI creates the fastest growing app ever, spawns a revolution bigger than the internet, and this guys take is they are like WeWork…

Being the first doesn’t mean you’ll win. They have no product, only a commodity that you can find at other companies or even for free (DeepSeek).

They have a product but it’s a commodity now.

They are in the business of selling compute / datacenter rack spaces. A server where you pay per GBs transferred in/out.

If it’s Gemini or GPT behind, for most use cases users wouldn’t care.

Re: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

#319

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

dangus wrote: post #280
max51 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "circular investment" is mostly start up companies using their stocks instead of cash to pay for server hardware and cloud computing. There is a few extra steps in between that make things look weird and convoluted, but the end results is really just big companies giving hardware and getting shares of ai companies in exchange for it.

I think you’re just describing how it’s circular. It’s like Toys R Us not having enough money to pay Mattel for Barbie dolls and telling Mattel they can have partial ownership of the company if they just supply them with some more toys. But the problem is that Toys R Us is spending $15, 20, or maybe even $50 (who knows?) to sell a $10 toy. Toys R Us continues selling toys faster and faster despite a lack of profit, m…

OK, so absolutely good faith here what is the end game?

Obviously, there’s a scenario of super power AI and then it’s a matter of continuing course. Electricity and silicon.

What if you are right, and the scaling doesn’t work. It is too much power, time, hardware to improve… does openAI fold?

Do they just actual use the models they have?

Does everyone just decide that AI didn’t work and go back 5 years like it didn’t happen?

Does the price change so that they have to be profitable making AI services expensive and rare instead of today where they are everywhere pointlessly?

Or does this insane valuation only make sense with information you don’t have like insider scaling or efficiency news?

Does China’s strategy of undercutting US value of models pay off bigly?

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