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

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101–110 of 144 posts

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

#101
post #96

The duopoly slowly turning into a monopoly won't be pretty.

I suspect that Google is working on improving their models for coding behind the scenes. Hopefully they release something soon to compete with Codex and CC. To be candid, I use CC, but have not tried out Codex.

I’ve tried them all and have come to slightly prefer Codex (with CC close second).

Google has the benefit of being insanely profitable though.

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

#102

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.

> Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.

Are they actually driving any profit? I mean actual profit, not "tokens" or users or profit but ignoring inference costs, same ignoring training, R&D, etc. I'm not arguing against how useful it is, nor how popular, just the basic total spent - total earned.

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

#103
post #83

Nothing is worth $852B in that space of time unless they are printing more than half of that in cash which to be clear they are not. They are burning it at that rate. Let's be clear. It's a valuable company, a valuable product, a valuable technology. It set the trend for the next phase of computer usage. But it's not worth $852B in that span of time and when it goes public that reality will bear down on them quickly.…

> justified in another 10 years.

Hard to imagine when they don't have any moat.

Sure they have ... I don't know how many users but it's not like a social network. Instagram was valued $10B with 10 very VERY fast not because of it's tech or employees but mostly IMHO because of the number of locked in users ... because of OTHER users.

Here if one wants to move from OpenAI to Anthropic, they can and they do. You might have difficulty exporting history, context, etc but you make it.

Even basic email has more lock-in than any of the model provider. They did have some moat few years ago, arguably, but now no differentiator that would justify such a valuation.

They are no Meta/Google/Microsoft/Oracle not because of their size or technology but only because their customers can swap providers.

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

#104

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…

The point of AI is that it's supposed to be intelligent. Why silo it in an app? Instead of telling it what to automate, shouldn't it sit at the OS level, watch everything you do, and figure out what to automate by itself?

Humans do not want something sitting at the OS level, watching everything you do. Microsoft, famously, tried this and the backlash was immediate and intense.

If you believe you can do better, then build it! I don't think the tide has changed though.

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

#105

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…

The point of AI is that it's supposed to be intelligent. Why silo it in an app? Instead of telling it what to automate, shouldn't it sit at the OS level, watch everything you do, and figure out what to automate by itself?

Most people don’t have good enough hardware to run a decent model. I’m not even sure if any local models can handle image input (but I’m by no means an expert in local models).

So if you’re going to need the data center to process it, then you run into the same issue Microsoft did when they announced the OS feature where they took screenshots of your desktop all the time for advanced search or whatever. People consider it to be a privacy issue.

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

#106

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?

It’s the second killer app. The first was AI Chat. It was genuinely game changing and still is.

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

#107
post #2

What happens if OpenAI collapses at this point? Is it just too big to fail given defense contracts and Microsoft? The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively. Anyone seeing differently?

and claude is actually meh too!

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone seeing differently? There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude. Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.

That's crazy talk. I am on the $20 plan and I do hit the limit occasionally, but I get a few hours of usage before I do.

the rate limit is clearly stochastic. they've made their availability a skinner box and everyone is falling for it.

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

#109
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone seeing differently? There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude. Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.

> Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting Utterly not my experience. I use opus near daily for long research sessions (not all agent based). Are you throwing in 100k input tokens to every query?

skinner box

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

#110

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…

"previous killer apps" - exactly. That's the point. Everyone is anchored in AI as being the next desktop app. It's not.

We're only using 1% of what these models will ultimately do when they're running 24/7 as utilities serving new economic models.

There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.

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