OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by evgen » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:50 AM UTC

kevinqi wrote: post #362

samdjstephens wrote: post #23

> The broad consumer reach of ChatGPT creates a powerful distribution channel into the workplace They mention this line in different forms a couple of times in the article. It’s clear they’re pretty rattled about Anthropic’s momentum in enterprise, I wonder how confident they really are in this rationale.

I don't know if it's guaranteed to work, but the strategy is real. I know Notion won vs. competitors in the space because they focused on consumer first, and consumers then brought Notion into their workplaces.

I am amused that you think IT is going to respond to an unmanaged LLM tool that operates outside of the LLM policies all serious enterprises have set up by now and say 'wow, that is cool and maybe we should buy in to this!'

What is going to happen is that the emplyee who tries to sneak OpenAI into our org is going to have two meetings set up by the end of the day, one with IT to ensure the whatever tool they installed is burned out with fire and one with HR to ensure they know the company policy and acknowledge that another fuck-up like this is a firing offense.

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

#402

Post by CraigRood » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:51 AM UTC

chronc6393 wrote: post #373

troupo wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Profit is money you couldn’t figure out how to spend. Profit is the money showing your business is sustainable. Ever since the ZIRP era US companies keep haemorrhaging money at a rate that is physically impossible to recoup. If OpenAI plans to lose 100+ billion dollars per year for half a decade, what profits are you talking about to offset the losses? > When the company/market matures, you want pure profits becaus…

> what profits are you talking about to offset the losses? You don’t need profit to offset the losses. You can simply reduce spending / expenses.

In principle yes, but all metrics so far suggest they are losing money every user interaction. There is very little network effect with these tools so It's not like they can start cutting back on staff and feature deployment.

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

#403

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:54 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #399

qurren wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Situation A: You're Amazon. You give OpenAI $50B cash investment, they then hand you back the $50B over time because they buy $50B worth of Amazon AWS services (they would use AWS or other equivalent compute anyway). OpenAI pays an additional $1-5B in sales taxes on top of their $50B compute purchase. Now let's say you have $25B opex for said compute. You then have $25B profits, you pay 21% corporate taxes on the pro…

Isn’t sales tax only for consumers? Ie companies reverse charge sales tax or omit it entirely. Or what is this 2% - 10% sales tax you’re referring to?

> Isn’t sales tax only for consumers?

It depends how you defined “consumers”. If you mean “those who consume the good subject to the tax, rather than people who resell the good”, yes, ideally.

If you mean “not businesses” or “individuals but not corporations”, then, no.

> Ie companies reverse charge sales tax or omit it entirely.

Generally, the theory of sales taxes is that people (including corporations) pay sales tax on things they consume as a final good rather than use as an intermediate good in production or simply resell. The exact way in which that is determined varies somewhat between jurisdictions with sales taxes, but generally (assuming paper is subject to sales tax in a jurisdiction), if you are buying paper to print books that you sell, you don't pay sales tax, if you are buying paper to print internal documents that you use in running the business, you do pay sales tax.

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

#404

Post by LaGrange » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

chronc6393 wrote: post #373

troupo wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Profit is money you couldn’t figure out how to spend. Profit is the money showing your business is sustainable. Ever since the ZIRP era US companies keep haemorrhaging money at a rate that is physically impossible to recoup. If OpenAI plans to lose 100+ billion dollars per year for half a decade, what profits are you talking about to offset the losses? > When the company/market matures, you want pure profits becaus…

> what profits are you talking about to offset the losses? You don’t need profit to offset the losses. You can simply reduce spending / expenses.

lol that’s a line so incredibly naive it hurts.

One does not “simply” reduce spending.

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

#405

Post by jongjong » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:00 AM UTC

People won't be able to afford to leave their beds because food prices will be too high to justify the energy cost of standing up.

Every joule of human energy is energy that could have been better spent to produce AI slop for other AI agents to consume.

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

#406

Post by nl » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

troupo wrote: post #372

nl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point - exactly - of profit? Profit is money you can't find a use for to grow your business, so you give some of it to the government in the form of tax. Also there is a big difference between operational expenses and capital expenses like building data centers. I think OpenAI is being very aggressive on the growth vs conservative financial management spectrum but just saying "only profit should matter" i…

What's the point - exactly - of a company being sustainable?

Being profitable isn't the same as sustainable.

Even a simple shop isn't profitable for months if it needs to buy stock up front, and run some ads to let people know about it. The money for that comes from the shop owners as an investment.

This is the same thing but on a slightly bigger scale, over a longer time frame.

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

#407

Post by manquer » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:22 AM UTC

ml-anon wrote: post #384

manquer wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the short term there are distortions and inefficiencies. It may feel like free market is done .

However in the long term, economics usually finds the most efficient way.

Maintaining inefficient structures like tariffs or monopolies becomes more and more expensive and eventually untenable and disruptions will occur.

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

#408

Post by muskstinks » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:37 AM UTC

natas wrote: post #342

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.

I'm following this very closly and i'm stunned. Any infos on why you think they are behind antrophic in years?

I do see less quality from reasoning at chatgpt compared to Gemini but otherwise i'm not seeing a year or years gap.

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

#409

Post by cowl » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

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?

it's not really investing though. Amazon will provide 50B worth of compute and Nvidia will provide 30B worth of chips etc. Google doesnt need any of those.

The only one that is really investing is SoftBank who is pushing for a faster IPO so they hope to make a profit on that and again Google does not offer that opportunity

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

#410

Post by farialima » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #407

ml-anon wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the short term there are distortions and inefficiencies. It may feel like free market is done . However in the long term, economics usually finds the most efficient way. Maintaining inefficient structures like tariffs or monopolies becomes more and more expensive and eventually untenable and disruptions will occur.

In the long term we are all dead. (Keynes)

Really feels like 1928