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OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#61

Post by nl »

mandevil wrote: post #48
matchagaucho wrote: post #29

As someone working in the enterprise space with OAI, this still feels like we're in the top of the first inning. Many teams remain anchored on equating AI with chat experiences, while a growing share of enterprise value is emerging from leasing compute clusters to run agentic workloads in containerized environments. OpenAI has built a cloud-first architecture that supports this model. The desktop experience and appli…

I know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet. Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very…

I think that fact that IPOs have grown slower over the years is more about larger VC markets where they can fund valuations up to hundreds of billions rather than something to do with adoption.

As you note, Netscape and Amazon IPOed fairly quickly.

Google took 6 years (1998 to 2004)

Facebook took 8 years (2004 to 2012)

Alibaba Group took 15 years (1999 to 2014)

Claude Code is at $30B annual recurring revenue, and it launched in Feb 2025, and OpenAI at $25B (although they measure partner revenue differently). By comparison the iPhone make $630M revenue in the 12 months after it was launched.

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#62

Post by impulser_ »

birdfood wrote: post #60
impulser_ wrote: post #30

"You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" The ironic part about this is GPT models are by far the worst models to chat too. I think I rather talk to a wall than GPT-5.4. It so unpleasant. I feel bad for anyone who only experience with AI is ChatGPT.

There’s roughly 8b people in the world and somewhere between 2-3b have never used the internet. If OpenAI manages to capture the 6b internet users growing at 100% per year, they have 3 years of user growth left max. Then what?

They do what Facebook and Google did. Ads.

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#63

Post by bpt3 »

nopinsight wrote: post #59
dagamer34 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplifi…

I don't think 'software brain' is required for non-coding tasks. Rather, it requires 'manager brain', the ability to delegate, direct, and review the output. Manager brain is more prevalent than software brain and likely learnable by many knowledge workers who don't yet have it.

How do you delegate, direct, and validate results if you have no idea what you're looking at?

This is the same issue many managers of people have for the same reason.

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#64

Post by timmmmmmay »

gradus_ad wrote: post #8

Claude Code is extremely easy to set up and use. I suspect its saturation among software professionals is at the majority of the addressable market. What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers. The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.

it's been pretty funny seeing people who did not predict Claude Code's success and previously said the whole sector was a nonsense dead end now saying, well okay there's one massively successful killer app, but what if that's the only one ever?

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#66

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

nopinsight wrote: post #59
dagamer34 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplifi…

I don't think 'software brain' is required for non-coding tasks. Rather, it requires 'manager brain', the ability to delegate, direct, and review the output. Manager brain is more prevalent than software brain and likely learnable by many knowledge workers who don't yet have it.

You have to recognize that it's a problem to delegate in the first place. One example I love to trot out is, do you have any toilet seats in your life that kinda slide around bit and don't seem securely attached? It's absolutely trivial to fix this, and it's really annoying when it happens, yet with shocking frequency I encounter people who've just been dealing with the annoyance because they didn't process it as something they could solve.

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#67

Post by hedmundson »

bickfordb wrote: post #52
echelon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the Claude Code market was the biggest swing and miss ever. Too busy trying to make TikTok for preteens with $4/generation videos that lost their novelty the minute IP was off the table. Didn't even identify the professional market in video was the correct place to invest, like Kling and ByteDance did. Chasing consumer killed their ascendency. Sam is a ruthless leader and knows how to build an empire, but he'…

What evidence is there that he knows how to build an empire outside of fundraising?

The 750+ million users of ChatGPT might count for something...

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#68

Post by mandevil »

grtteee wrote: post #56
mandevil wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet. Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very…

Most people don’t want to accept and believe that the only viable revenue stream is selling tokens in relation to software development. All the other stuff is nice… but you will continue to be money losing and eventually die. Now you can’t come out and say this because there’s a whole bunch of investments that depend on hype - think about the robotics nonsense.

Is it actually profitable? That the presumed market leader, Anthropic, changed their business model just today to kill off their buffet monthly plans and switch to a la carte for Enterprise makes me doubt they are making money off of selling tokens to software developers.

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#69

Post by jmyeet »

I don't believe that either Anthropic or OpenAI are going to survive the AI valuation crunch. Google, Meta and Microsoft will because they're not AI-only companies. There are four reasons why I believe this:

1. I honestly don't think that AI is all that useful for anything other than suppressing labor costs and I don't expect that to change in the short to medium term;

2. I really don't think Anthropic or OpenAI can ever satisfy their stratospheric valuations. I foreesee no cash flow possible that will arrive quick enough to make that happen;

3. Hardware costs will devalue the trillions invested in AI data centers. By 2030 the GPUs will probably be at least 3x as good. Bear in mind, it's just over 4 years between the 3090 and 5090 and that's 3x TFLOPS; and

4. China or other actors will make sure that proprietary LLMs won't be dominant. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow. China in particularly won't want a US tech company to dominate this space. The increasing RAM in local, relatively cheap computers will make this more and more viable.

Bonus prediction: I think China will be making their own homegrown NVidia equivalent GPUs on homegrown EUV by 2030.

Re: OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

#70

Post by grtteee »

nopinsight wrote: post #59
dagamer34 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplifi…

I don't think 'software brain' is required for non-coding tasks. Rather, it requires 'manager brain', the ability to delegate, direct, and review the output. Manager brain is more prevalent than software brain and likely learnable by many knowledge workers who don't yet have it.

The whole point of click and point (gui) was that one barely had to engage the brain vs using a terminal.

The ideal experience is where one’s resources are able to be allocated such that one can achieve some goal with minimal effort. We are very far away from this ideal with llm’s and absurd amounts of money has already been spent.

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