Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

nytimes.com

141–150 of 159 posts

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#141
post #22

The window has basically closed for them for the time being. The business math just isn’t there. The best option at this point is kick the can down the road and hope market sentiment improves next year. Not much signal that it will, and quite a lot of signal the sentiment only declines, but pumping the brakes is the least worst option on the table.

They should have done it a year or two ago when the hype was strong.

Today everyone knows there's no agi coming up and it will be a very long time until they generate any profits, if ever.

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not a secret, and therefore already priced in, right?

It's also a tiny effect given the total-market funds buy small amounts of each company, and the NASDAQ 100 isn't particularly big. If S&P had changed its rules for the S&P 500, there would have been an effect. In the end, the drama was almost entirely a spectacle for finance influencers and their viewers.

QQQ is the largest of the Nasdaq100 tracking funds. It's only about 1%, increasing to 4% of the QQQ, which is ~$350B in size. So it's only $3.5B of forced buying or a little less that 5% (of $75B). For the second float would be and additional ~$14B, again about 5%.

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#143
post #6

> The A.I. company’s advisers are pushing its chief executive, Sam Altman, to move slowly after SpaceX’s stock has been volatile and as the start-up grapples with financial challenges. SpaceX's stock volatile? It's a shame nobody saw that coming.

Yes, it's actually the first volatile high-profile IPO so you can see why some people need to be reminded of the possibility.

I didn't partake but from elon's shenanigans with bitcoin and doge (the coin, not the govt thing) it seemed clear he'd do similar with the stock

is tesla stock not volatile too? elon stock's are more like today's crypto than a 20th's century company stock w dividends

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#144

They just want to see Anthropic crash first and then be the last survivor.

> They just want to see Anthropic crash first and then be the last survivor. I don't think so. There's only two real options here: 1. There's no bubble to pop 2. There's a bubble to pop In the first case, the first AI company to IPO gets a ton of money from the market who wants to get in on this, and the second to IPO finds that there's not enough capital left in the public markets and has to sell for less than they'…

The first ai IPO is spaceX.

Its already not anthropic or openAI.

But there might still be some water in the well for the second one, there definitely won't be for the third one.

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business math just isn’t there. What do you mean? I promise I'm not being facetious or satirical. I'm just too simple and conservative of an investor to understand this comment. (for example: Is the price-to-earnings ratio too high? I probably wouldn't want to invest in the business.)

They are losing too much money. With open source options that are always close to frontier performance it will always be hard for them reduce training costs and charge premium rates.

I guess my point is that IPO timing is irrelevant if they don’t have an actual profitable business.

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them The populist backlash is coming for datacenters. I'm unconvinced that's truly problematic to these companies given data travels close to the speed of light and plenty of countries have energy, data interconnects and governments unresponsive to locals' concerns.

This morning I heard a convincing argument that the data center backlash is only really significant in the USA because jobs here equal health care access. Europeans can afford to be less threatened existentially.

Its also about pollution and water and similar concerns

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#147

AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them, or perhaps they see political winds favorable to regulatory capture in the future and are waiting for that?

Data centers are the next Dark Fiber from 2000. After VCs and private Equity fund them there will not be sufficient demand because AI will inevitably not entirely live up to all the hype. The fire sale will eventually begin. Then Google, M$, Apple and Amazon will buy them at a discount just like Google snatched up the dark fiber after 2000.

Only worse: internet infrastructure (routers, fiber, ...) depreciates over multiple decades, not mere months. What's inside those data centers matters more than them being built: today's cutting edge inference chips or GPUs may not be so useful if either hardware or models evolve in the slightest, and in some way, we should hope for that if we want to be optimistic about the future of AI/LLMs.

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#148

AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them, or perhaps they see political winds favorable to regulatory capture in the future and are waiting for that?

Data centers are the next Dark Fiber from 2000. After VCs and private Equity fund them there will not be sufficient demand because AI will inevitably not entirely live up to all the hype. The fire sale will eventually begin. Then Google, M$, Apple and Amazon will buy them at a discount just like Google snatched up the dark fiber after 2000.

Fiber is good for a hundred years, nothing in a data center will last ten.

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#149

Part of the issue is the respective positioning: - OpenAI wants to be the consumer version of AI, modeled after Google and Meta, with a mostly free universal service powered by ads and e-commerce. They haven't fully shown that model can work. The big problem is the lack of zero marginal costs as each new user requires GPU spend. - Anthropic positions itself more as enterprise AI, modeled after Microsoft ironically en…

Even open source models need hardware and energy to inference. Therefore, anyone offering a free ChatGPT competitor will be using the same unit economics. My bet is that OpenAI will make free ChatGPT work through ads.

It's a very open question whether the economics for ads work though. Ads aren't just an infinite money pit you can just reach into, they have a price ceiling you have to stay under before they stop making sense for the advertiser. And if some of the rumours about OpenAI's ad CPMs are true, the inventory is going to be massively expensive.

It makes sense for it to be expensive, mind. The unit cost of serving an LLM response is so much higher than the unit cost of serving a bunch of Instagram posts, or traditional search results or whatever.

But price too highly, most advertisers won't be able to justify them. Why spend $60 for what you can buy from Meta for $6? It's a brave media buyer who runs with that as a long term strategy. But if you don't price highly, you're just offsetting some of the losses. The whole reason Google, Meta et all's ad networks exploded what because they cost less to get reach than traditional media did before, which opened them up to a bazillion small businesses who otherwise didn't have the capital to get off the ground through traditional media. ChatGPT's will cost more than what's available now. Massively more. There's not a lot of history of that working out!

They'll get some buyers for a little while, the $60 vs $6 equation balances out if the ads are 10x more effective, and companies will throw a bit of money into campaigns to get a feel for how well they perform.

(Google is in a different position, they make basically near infinite margin on other ad types and can lump budgets in together to get still-attractive blended CPMs. It's a hit, but it's worth taking to protect their wider network, just like they did for years when Youtube wasn't remotely profitable.)

Re: OpenAI leans toward waiting until next year for IPO

#150
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know anthropics numbers? They still haven’t filed either.

They said they’re profitable on operating profit. Think it’s pretty safe to assume theirs are less of a dumpster fire

Well that’s great to hear that they are saying a non-GAAP profit metric is greater than zero.

I agree it’s less of a dumpster fire than OAI but that’s not a very hard bar to clear.

Post reply on HN