Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 529 posts

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#71

Post by mlsu »

sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

You can host a website on any rackmount server for pennies compared to AWS. But people still use AWS.

The market for local models is always gonna be a small niche, primarily for the paranoid.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#72

Post by Aurornis »

alyxya wrote: post #31

> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor investe…

That’s typical. Large funding rounds usually aren’t delivered as one single giant lump sum into the bank account. The capital is committed in stages that can depend on hitting milestones or goals.

This is done even in smaller startup funding rounds some times.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#73

Post by simianwords »

podgietaru wrote: post #21

I can't help but think building an "everything" app is so.. both unbelievably ambitious, and a folly. I am not personally convinced that people want all the things that this super app purports to do. I am from a generation that still sits behind a desktop computer when making "big purchases." I can't even buy a flight on my phone. I am so much less likely to want to have an AI agent do that for me. Then the idea that…

I think you lack imagination. This is going to be the future because it is legitimately a step up from the previous ways of doing things. I can do things that were way more difficult before.

It doesn't have to be AI all the way - no one's asking AI to book things on its own and make the payments on their own. What does work is, make AI do the research and you verify and you do the payment. Human in the loop.

To me this is clearly the future - AI has access to all the data sources and can translate your intent by accessing these tools in a loop and use intelligence to automate things.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#74

Post by dheera »

strongpigeon wrote: post #62
alyxya wrote: post #31

> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor investe…

I do wonder how much of Amazon's $50B share (per last press release) is in AWS credits rather than money in the bank.

Probably a lot? It would be much more tax-advantageous to do it this way, $50B worth of credits != $50B worth of spend on Amazon's part, and they might meet in the middle about how much equity that translates to.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#75

Post by operatingthetan »

simonjgreen wrote: post #61
sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

Anthropic is definitely gaining ground over OpenAI in the business world. Cowork is the absolute hotness right now, and even prompted MSFT to drop their own variant yesterday

Codex and Gemini CLI seem 1-2 months behind Claude Code. They will catch up. This race will eventually be won by whoever can come up with the cheapest compute.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#77

Post by clhodapp »

ravenstine wrote: post #67
sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

Though I think these companies are wildly overvalued, I don't see LLMs as a service going away in the future. The value in OpenAI is that it provides extra compute, data access, etc. My money is on local AI becoming more of a thing, while services like OpenAI still exist for local AIs to consult with. If a local model can somehow know that it's out of it's depth on a question/prompt, it can ask an OpenAI model if it'…

Models not being able to reliably know if they are out of their depth is a foundational limitation of the currently generation of models, though.

Best they can do is to somewhat reliably react to objective signals that they've failed at something (like test failures).

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#78

Post by randomNumber7 »

rvz wrote: post #13
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #9

Wow. I doubt Anthropic can raise that. Are they more efficient, can they do with less?

Anthropic doesn't have anything else other than the Claude models. But notice that no-one , not a single mention of Deepseek tells me that they are preparing to scare everyone again. Which is why Dario continues to scare-monger on local models. Sometimes you do not need hundreds of billions of dollars for inference when it can be done locally with efficient software; and Google proved that. But where is the money in…

Local models just make no economic sense since the GPU will idle 99% of the time.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#79

Post by Aurornis »

sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

> What is their next step to ensure local models never overtake them?

As someone who experiments with local models a lot, I don’t see this as a threat. Running LLMs on big server hardware will always be faster and higher quality than what we can fit on our laptops.

Even in the future when there are open weight models that I can run on my laptop that match today’s Opus, I would still be using a hosted variant for most work because it will be faster, higher quality, and not make my laptop or GPU turn into a furnace every time I run a query.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#80

Post by lukan »

mlsu wrote: post #71
sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

You can host a website on any rackmount server for pennies compared to AWS. But people still use AWS. The market for local models is always gonna be a small niche, primarily for the paranoid.

"The market for local models is always gonna be a small niche, primarily for the paranoid."

Have you ever heard of industrial espionage? Pr privacy regulations? Or military applications?

(Also the US military runs claude as a local model)

Post reply on HN