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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

#141
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?

Saudi oil money

Which might not be a thing anymore soon the way things are going…

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

#143
post #7

I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...? At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.

I would not call an effective 2.9% expense ratio "throwing a bone".

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

#144

I hate to read this line when academics and graduate students who work in basic and hard sciences have their funding cut. The grand funding that pays minimum wage to grad students is a burden for this society, yet for a company that took all the valuable data from sources that never got credit, raises billions of dollars. Open says the name, but closed it is by operation. Sorry for this rant, but the priorities of th…

Or all of the people that they didn’t ask, let alone compensate, that made all of the stuff they munged up for training data, so they could sell cheap knockoffs in the same markets.

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

#145
post #125
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?

Give me a billion and I'll have 500M of revenue in no time by selling dollars at 50 cents.

Why are we treating OpenAI and Anthropic differently than say, Amazon or Uber? Both companies invested in growth for many years before making a profit. Most tech companies in the last 2-3 decades lost money for years before making a profit.

Why are we saying that OpenAI and Anthropic can't do the same?

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

#146

They have to focus on the distant future (where they are frankly unlikely to exist) because they are falling further and further behind in the immediate future. Their latest desperate bid for relevance is a plugin for Claude Code that uses Codex as a second opinion. Please clap.

This a big exaggeration. Codex is probably one of the top two LLM programming tools, along with Claude Code. GPT-5.4 models are strong, unlike the initial GPT-5 ones, which were comparatively bad, and can hold up against Opus 4.6. In my experience, they are better at analytical work.

I cannot really see how they are "far behind," or how some plugin for Claude Code is a "last desperate bid." The tools are close enough to each other that I regularly use Codex one month and Claude Code the next without much disruption, just to try out any new models or features that might be available.

I do not have much visibility into the non-code applications, so maybe it is stickier there.

If/when the AI bubble pops and takes OpenAI down with it, I would not expect Anthropic to come out unscathed either.

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

#148

No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. A big chunk of that $122B is a "maybe" that depends on various things that need to happen in the future. Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.

Having large funding rounds contingent on meeting milestones is common. Always has been.

One of the stipulations is that OpenAI achieves "AGI"... Need I say more?

Also a lot of this "money" is in cloud compute and credits not cash so...

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

#149

No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. A big chunk of that $122B is a "maybe" that depends on various things that need to happen in the future. Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.

Seems like all of OpenAI's "deals" are announcement fodder with no real contract, primed to quietly fall through later.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why should only profits matter? if i had a killer product today that i just need to sell tomorrow, wouldn't you still invest today knowing i'll probably only start to make money tomorrow (or perhaps next week)? the expectation is that they'll eventually make money. they can't raise forever. only startups are not profitable for a few years. but most companies that have existed for a long while have been profitable and…

not if your product is selling two dollars for one dollar and as soon as you'll start to charge more I'll switch to one of your twenty competitors profit isn't a function of having a killer product, it's a function of having no competition

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 impossible to compete against TSMC because no one has the customer base to generate enough revenue to build the next generation of fabs - except those who are propped up by governments such as Intel and Rapidus. Samsung is basically the SK government.

I don’t see how companies can catch OpenAI or Anthropic without the strong revenue growth.

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