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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

#341

Post by bandrami »

nl wrote: post #325
bandrami wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's well know everyone is making great money on inference. That is not, in fact, "well known", but based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work and at least look like they're soliciting a constant firehose of investment money simply to keep the lights on. In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before…

> based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work I mean sure, it's self reported. But the inference prices somewhere like Fireworks or TogetherAI charges is comparable to what Google/AWS/Azure charge for the same model an we know they aren't losing money - they have public accounts that show it, eg: https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/wall…

> If someone has a subscription then yes that is pretty normal.

Not if you've substantively changed rate limits 3 times in the last 5 months while still counting those forecast revenues. In most industries that's called rug-pulling.

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

#342

Post by natas »

aurareturn wrote: post #58

$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…

OpenAI is a few years behind Anthropic, and it's unlikely they'll catch up at this point.

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

#343

Post by camillomiller »

Almost a trillion for a company that hasn’t proved it can reach any form of profitability, all on the promise of an elusive messianic concept of machine superintelligence through probabilistic algorithms. Basically like praying cancer away. Peak magical thinking, peak America.

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

#344

Post by michelb »

daemin wrote: post #336

What if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service. That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the…

I think there is a massive market in waiting for something that uses a way better UI/UX. I’d say chat is only great for developers/technical people.

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

#345

Post by tkgally »

daemin wrote: post #336

What if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service. That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the…

When I show people personal projects I’ve vibe-coded with Claude Code, they often seem impressed and envious. They come up with ideas for things that they would like to do, too. But they have full-time jobs outside of IT, and when I mention they might need to use the terminal to do what I’m doing now their eyes glaze over.

A couple of such people, after they learned about Claude Cowork, signed up for Anthropic subscriptions and are now using it in their jobs. But overall my impression is that there is still huge potential demand from regular people who use computers for agentic systems with less barrier to entry, and that many will be willing to pay for such systems when more mature and user-friendly ones arrive.

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

#346

Post by Gagarin1917 »

blobbers wrote: post #277

I get the appetite for frontier models. But why not just invest in Google. Do they really expect the return profile of OpenAI to be vastly different than Google’s Gemini?

I imagine they get a bigger slice of the pie with OpenAI than they do with Google, an extremely mature company who’s had investors buying in for 30 years.

Alphabet’s market cap is $3.5 trillion, compared to OpenAI’s $850 billion reported here.

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

#347

Post by quantummagic »

daemin wrote: post #336

What if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service. That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the…

> only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token

Or spend less per token (ie. increase profit margin without raising prices).

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

#349

Post by maxglute »

daemin wrote: post #336

What if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service. That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the…

Think about all the "people" AI services can displace in due time. There's a fuckload of pencil pushers / knowledge workers with 100k student loans whose lifetime contribution can probably be measured in a few hundred dollars in tokens. And TBH normalizing AI crutch for kids is going to make large % of future cohorts even more replaceable. Skill atrophy among youth is declining hard, but AI is basically crippling future workforce quality to make their displacement even easier. There's even less reason to hire entry level in 4 years not just because models get better but human capita is going to be so much worse.

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

#350

Post by hvb2 »

aurareturn wrote: post #122
troupo wrote: post #107

Earlier 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?

It's not as much as you think. Google is spending $185b on data centers this year alone. Amazon is spending $200b this year. Total capex for big tech is ~$700b in 2026 and we're not including neo clouds, Chinese clouds, and other sovereign data centers. Since everyone is trying to get compute from anywhere they can, including OpenAI going to Google, it's hard to tell what is used internally vs externally. For example…

But if Gemini doesn't end up using the compute because of whatever reason, Google has other ways to monetize that compute. OpenAI doesn't?

So the same money spent by OpenAI and Google doesn't carry nearly the same amount of risk?

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