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OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not if your product is selling two dollars for one dollar and as soon as you'll start to charge more I'll switch to one of your twenty competitors profit isn't a function of having a killer product, it's a function of having no competition

And why do you think twenty competitors can stay competitive for years to come? Industries always consolidate and winners emerge. SOTA LLMs look like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me because the cost to train the next model keeps going up such that it won't make sense for 20 competitors to compete at the very high end. TSMC is a perfect example of this. Fab costs double every 4 years (Rock’s Law). It's almost impo…

>Industries always consolidate and winners emerge.

no, most industries just sell boring generic products, a few industries favor monopolists. Semiconductors are one of them but LLMs are also as far removed from that business as is physically possible.

TSMC makes the most complicated machines humans have ever built, a LLM requires a few dozen nerds, a power plant, a few thousand lines of python and chips. That's why if you're Elon Musk you could buy all of the above and train yourself an LLM in a month.

LLMs are comically simple pieces of software, they're just big. But anyone with a billion dollars can have one, they're all going to be commoditized and free in due time, like search. Copying a lithography machine is difficult, copying software is easy. that's why Google burrowed itself into email, and browsers, and your phone's OS. Problem for openai is they don't have any of that, there's already half a dozen companies that, for 99% of people, do what they do.

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

#275

Does anyone know if this, like the spacex/xAI stock — will list on nasdaq? And will it be part of every market cap weighted index fund like VOO(S&P) etc or just for nasdax-100 etfs? The exchanges are bending head over heels to accommodate these IPOs[1] and make our retirement index funds the exit-liquidity strategy to the thievery of pump and dump actors that buy it low and then sell high? As i understand the way thi…

It does seem likely. Iirc SpaceX wants to waive the year long holding period before their stock enters the indexes.

Which to me seems like a very naked attempt at getting 401k to bag hold

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

#276

I hate to read this line when academics and graduate students who work in basic and hard sciences have their funding cut. The grand funding that pays minimum wage to grad students is a burden for this society, yet for a company that took all the valuable data from sources that never got credit, raises billions of dollars. Open says the name, but closed it is by operation. Sorry for this rant, but the priorities of th…

We’re all feeling it. Unfortunately our country is run by a dude with dementia and a carnival of Fox News hosts.

But I suspect that’ll u-turn hard when the economy implodes

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

#279

$2b/month which is $24b/year. Not as much as I expected considering they were at $20b by end of 2025.[0] They only added $4b since? Anthropic had $19b by end of February 2026 and they added $6b in February alone.[1] This means if they added another $6b in March, they're higher than OpenAI already. However, I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue in a different way. OpenAI takes 20% of revenue from Azure sale…

Still a huge amount of revenue for any company. Those $20/month fees are going to triple in a couple yrs. But the VCs expect much much more.

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

#280

No, 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.

I've wondered how many announced fundraising rounds were like this. It's in everyone's interest (VCs and entrepreneurs) if the message to the outside world is "this company is amazing so they've raised a boatload of cash". But VCs might not want to give it all up front, or unconditionally. It makes it hard to say what the valuation of a company is. If the milestones are unlikely to be hit, then it's anyone's guess.

There's an accelerator here in Taiwan with a model I truly don't understand: 100k usd for 10%. 10%!! You've just valued the company at only 1 million! And taken a HUGE chunk of equity, not much left on the table!

Maybe it makes sustainable sense but in the world of venture capital it seems the most profitable thing to do is lie through a Cheshire grin, every day.

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