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Don't know why so many down votes for something that's clearly just another opinion
Probably because it reads a little like an LLM and also has an emdash
OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
171–180 of 529 posts
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#172[dead]
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#173No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. A big chunk of that $122B is a "maybe" that depends on various things that need to happen in the future. Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.
that being said, how can Softbank keep throwing around all these astronomical numbers after so many bad investments? Leftover iPhone money?
Their ~$50 million total Alibaba investment turned into ~$70 billion. As of two years ago they were still liquidating out of it.
January 26, 2024 - "Japanese investment holding firm SoftBank Group Corp has largely cleared its ownership in e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, concluding one of the most successful deals in China's internet industry and a holding that spanned about 23 years."
"SoftBank, which invested US$20 million into Alibaba when it was still a start-up in 2000, said in a corporate filing on Thursday that it was set to book a gain of 1.26 trillion yen (US$8.5 billion) - about 425 times the value of its initial outlay - for the Tokyo-based firm's 2024 financial year after divesting its [remaining] shares via subsidiary Skybridge."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/japans-softbank-concludes-run...
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation. Both will do public reporting only when they IPO[4] and have regulatory requirement to do so every quarter. For private companies[1] reporting to investors there are no fixed rules really[3] Even for public companies, there is fair amount of leeway on how G…
They aren't reporting anything yet. What we hearing is just from news media who get their leaks/info from investors who get some form of IR reports/ presentation. The $24b figure is literally in OpenAI's announcement. The $19b ARR and $6b added in Feb came directly from Anthropic CEO recently.
Announcing isn't reporting. Am I the only one old enough to remember Enron?
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that is revenue only. In the past 15 or so years most US companies (and especially startups) always talk about revenue only. Wheras only profit should matter. E.g. what good is 20 billion per year when "OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030". That is $150 billion per year?
why should only profits matter? if i had a killer product today that i just need to sell tomorrow, wouldn't you still invest today knowing i'll probably only start to make money tomorrow (or perhaps next week)? the expectation is that they'll eventually make money. they can't raise forever. only startups are not profitable for a few years. but most companies that have existed for a long while have been profitable and…
> why should only profits matter?
In this case because it's not clear that anybody has actually figured out how to sell inference for more than it costs
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#176feels 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…
If your laptop overheats when you push your GPU, you can buy purpose-built "gaming" laptops that are at least nominally intended to sustain those workloads with much better cooling. Of course, running your inference on a homelab platform deployed for that purpose, without the thermal constraints of a laptop, is also possible.
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just makes comparing funding rounds hard to understand, since money in the bank is money in the bank, and a lot of the "committed capital if you reach a milestone" is capital that would be easy to get if you reached that milestone, if it is sufficiently advanced, and has enough outs, etc., that you may as well have just raised another round in the future.
That’s logically inconsistent. If the company was performing poorly enough that they couldn’t meet their funding milestones from a previous round, they’re not going to have an easy time raising the same money in a future round. The milestones aren’t a hard-stop that forbids the previous funding round participants from providing the money if they still choose. It’s just an out.
What I am saying is that if you do meet the milestones from your previous round, you're going to have an easy time fundraising anyway, so funding contingent on milestones isn't that different than just saying "well, if we need more money we can do another round"
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#178I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...? At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.
I think this is reality-distortion field rivaling that of Jobs', and a crisis of faith. Nobody apparently believes that capital is worth investing into anything but AI.
But they're really cagey about actually handing money over to them today
Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#179Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just makes comparing funding rounds hard to understand, since money in the bank is money in the bank, and a lot of the "committed capital if you reach a milestone" is capital that would be easy to get if you reached that milestone, if it is sufficiently advanced, and has enough outs, etc., that you may as well have just raised another round in the future.
Note that even that "money in the bank" of traditional venture firm is not really money in the bank. VC, PE, and hedge fund managers usually don't have all the cash for the fund sitting in the bank at all times. Rather, their agreement with the LPs that fund the fund is structured as a series of capital calls: it gives the fund the right to demand that their LPs deposit cash in their bank accounts within 10-30 days,…
When a startup raises money without contingencies, typically they do get a large amount of money in the bank all at once.