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Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

openai.com

201–210 of 345 posts

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#201

The timing of all of these IPOs has a smell similar to both the US Mortgage company trend shortly before interest rates spiked and all those companies started shedding jobs progressively since, and/or the DotCom IPO boom. Where we land remains to be seen.

Ben Felix got a great video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw

The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess.

But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Probably because they know there is a high chance of a big crash coming after.

I will not touch those IPOs with a 10 feet long pole. But unfortunately a lot of people are about to get burned.

My prediction is that this is what will be remembered as the last bit of exuberance before everything starts to unravel.

Books will be written about how insiders will be profiting millions by unloading those shares to the greatest fools and middle class america.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree on the smell I think that the situations are really different. I am not an economist but I think that other than the situation of the huge amount of money in play we are in a really different case. The general user (and I have noticed it especially with today's WWDC) basically doesn't get any benefit from AI (neither LLMs, image generation or photo editing). They were promised living like in Wall-e in 5…

My father in law owns a small manufacturing business and is not technical at all. His computer skills stop with some CAD and basic excel. He pays for ChatGPT as does his wife and her kids. The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product. Almost every coffee shop I go to has people talking about AI and ChatGPT even in areas with no tech populations. I…

The question in my mind is persistence. Everyone goes through the honeymoon phase. I'm absolutely loathing the idea that phones are arriving soon with chatbot junk built deeply into it, enough that the thought is more what if I could maybe just stop using my phone so much. I threw myself at the Llama WhatsApp integration when I first got it, now the idea of having Llama in WhatsApp just feels so dumb.

I was a huge early fan of ChatGPT voice too, but I don't think I've used voice mode anywhere in at least 6 months. The question is what is the right level people are generally going to settle on for the use of these tools in the long term. 80% of my usage isn't much more than a better Google, I could live without it and I could live with cheaper options. I'm not sure the consumer money is going to be there en masse as hoped

Of course it still leaves a huge amount of business cases open, but I suppose the same principle applies. How soon will people tire of talking to robo-voice when they call their bank? etc.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#203
post #186

The timing of all of these IPOs has a smell similar to both the US Mortgage company trend shortly before interest rates spiked and all those companies started shedding jobs progressively since, and/or the DotCom IPO boom. Where we land remains to be seen.

The content of all these comments has a smell similar to 2023 when NVDA had a spectacular run and HN was absolutely sure that AI is a bubble. It's also similar to 2024 when HN was sure that AI is a bubble. Similar to 2025 when HN commentators were sure that AI is a bubble. 1000% gains later, HN will continue to identify patterns of 2000/2008 and are absolutely convinced it is a bubble Note: If a company gains 1000% a…

Depending on how much that bubble will pop, all of those above might still be very right.

We could very well go back to the 2021 valuations.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#204

The timing of all of these IPOs has a smell similar to both the US Mortgage company trend shortly before interest rates spiked and all those companies started shedding jobs progressively since, and/or the DotCom IPO boom. Where we land remains to be seen.

Ben Felix got a great video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess. But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Proba…

I’m also staying away. I need to not lose money more than I need to gain money.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#205
post #196

How much did Apple (via Google (via xAI (via SpaceX))) just crush their product? Seems an awful lot like Apple will commoditize the models that power Siri, and just “sherlocked” a trillion dollar private company.

If you think Apple just sherlocked OpenAI, you havn't been paying attention to the pivot OpenAI has been doing for the last 7 months

whats the pivot? codex superapp?

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is how it's even a good low-margin business. Maybe I'm missing something but: Data centers (before recently) are low margin businesses because all the inputs are commodities: you buy power (joules), power (PDU), cooling hardware, physical racks, etc.. from the same vendors as everyone else. Worse, your biggest potential clients have the scale to just build it on their own and cut you out becau…

I wonder if they do have non-commodity AI capabilities, just, ones that don’t translate into a world-class frontier model. Like they might have hired really good AI infra folks, gotten really good uptimes on their nodes, gotten folks who really know how to configure Infiniband (or whatever). But then, didn’t find the folks who knew what to run on that infrastructure. Or maybe Grok just had too much political drama ar…

Maybe they have something else im the books, I truly have no idea. But once you get down from the top rung of full-bandwidth cross section networking at the 100k node networking scale "AI" infra, theres no shortage of people who can do that. Most importantly, labor isn't the big chunk of the outlay. Even if they have 50 engineers clearing $1m/yr, that's pocket change for everything else

EDIT: said 50 engineers at $50m/yr originally and meant 50 @ $1m/yr

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#207
post #33
post #29

I don’t get what’s the point of non-profits if you can IPO them. How does that make any sense?

They're IPOing a commercial subsidiary of OpenAI so that it can donate even more money to the parent nonprofit. (Actually the subsidiary is everything and the nonprofit is a do-nothing fig leaf but the IRS and Congress seem to not care enough to stop them.)

Just the fact that they still calling themselves OpenAI is so grotesque.

Similar to Google with "Don't be evil". At least they got the decency to eventually remove it when they realized they were actually doing evil.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#208

The timing of all of these IPOs has a smell similar to both the US Mortgage company trend shortly before interest rates spiked and all those companies started shedding jobs progressively since, and/or the DotCom IPO boom. Where we land remains to be seen.

While I agree on the smell I think that the situations are really different. I am not an economist but I think that other than the situation of the huge amount of money in play we are in a really different case. The general user (and I have noticed it especially with today's WWDC) basically doesn't get any benefit from AI (neither LLMs, image generation or photo editing). They were promised living like in Wall-e in 5…

I wouldn't argue the same.

My parents love using ChatGPT, asking it all kinds of questions. My mom discovered Claude and helps her immensely with her job - where she would have to take it home and work a few hours to be able to finish the tasks on her computer, as her company that still uses Office 98, now Claude does it in 5 minutes.

They fixed so many random issues using it, it is insane. My dad had a bike issue which would otherwise be solved by either trying to find obscure manuals from 20 years ago on random forums with me translating it from english to our language, or by taking it to a mechanic which could take months. This way, he just snapped a few photos, said what the problem is, and in a few minutes he had the fix.

I've built software that uses LLM's for a specific usecase - besides general adoption, professionals in the field contacted me and thanked me for making their lives easier, as the tasks would often take a lot of manual work. These people are earning way more from using my software, than I am from their subscriptions, which is still about 20x more than my API costs are.

While most non-dev people are behind the curve, the impact it has on their lives is becoming bigger and bigger by the day.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#209

The timing of all of these IPOs has a smell similar to both the US Mortgage company trend shortly before interest rates spiked and all those companies started shedding jobs progressively since, and/or the DotCom IPO boom. Where we land remains to be seen.

Ben Felix got a great video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess. But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Proba…

> point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market

I think this is what's going on right now. But there are a variety of reasons that can drive IPO timing. Need for cash and owners needing liquidity being chief among them.

I'd also say that post-Covid, retail has become a commanding section of the American equity markets in a way I don't think they've been in my lifetime. As a result, every IPO from now on will have to target retail.

Re: Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers are public now, this is obviously false

If SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic get fast tracked to be on NASDAQ or S&P 500 then they are required to be included in index funds which will be automatically included in retirement accounts and that will give investors an exit. https://youtu.be/yhRjvX_t4hc?si=N-a-s_5ttWKfVeJZ

yes it will keep the grift going for a couple months due to the index artificial demand. Actually, SpaceX timed the unlocking of their shares to the timeline index funds will have to buy.

Guess who will hold the bag when it's all going downhill?

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