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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

#381
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the point - exactly - of profit? It's what attracts capital investment, which businesses need

OpenAI seems to do reasonably well at attracting capital investment without profits. As did Amazon, Google, Meta etc etc.

If I remember correctly, Facebook took 10 years raising money before going ipo.

Could be wrong though.

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

#382
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also they need to pay back that in one year, so if OpenAI don't IPO this year they are screwed

Was curious about the source here. Seems widely reported and I just missed it. This a unpaywalled source I found https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/27/why-softbanks-new-40b-loan...

they are Hwanging it

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the GAAP accounting matter if everyone passively buys shares due to the new fast entry rules, which corruptly will force us all to buy into these companies? The fundamentals and true value seem less relevant than ever: https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/03/51248353/michael...

Diluting the index entry rules, only devalues the index utility. When it becomes a bigger problem, other indices with higher quality controls will out compete the current ones and be used by asset managers seeking safety. More likely than not, most of us are already holding stock in these companies one way or another. All the Mag 7 hold a major chunk of OAI and Anthropic stock anyway, slower entry does not make it le…

lol imagine someone believing in the invisible hand of the free market in 2026

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

#385
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that being said, how can Softbank keep throwing around all these astronomical numbers after so many bad investments? Leftover iPhone money?

Most people know Softbank as the company who lost billions on WeWork and not the company who made several more billions on the ARM IPO.

Yeah I checked their overall return. It's average. Not better than index funds IIRC.

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

#387
What will happen first? The Singularity arrives, and hyper-intelligent AI causes such rapid technological change that the world becomes unrecognizable overnight?

Or OpenAI pays off it's investors? Lol.

I am not sure if I believe in the Singularity or not. But it's kind of the best story ever to support the game of musical chairs that is Silicon Valley investing.

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

#388
post #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.

Friends of mine working in AI companies are saying we’ll be lucky if they only triple. More like 10-20x long term, especially for enterprise

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

#389
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Friends of mine working in AI companies are saying we’ll be lucky if they only triple. More like 10-20x long term, especially for enterprise

Oh, I read it as the number of subscribers would triple, but you're suggesting the price will?

That makes a little more sense, because the number of subscribers are so low that tripling won't really make much difference in terms of turning a profit.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google has already surpassed them both in all areas except coding. People on HN only look at benchmarks, but Gemini's multimodal understanding, things like identifying what a plant is, normal user use cases (other than chatting), integration with other tools, is much better. It's believable that Meta, ByteDance, etc. can catch up too. It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely,…

> It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely

It's certain that it won't. We've already hit diminishing returns.

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