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Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

openai.com

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems to ignore the fact that millions of non-technical people did pay cash for a product: AOL. And in fact the AOL buyout of Time Warner coincided almost exactly with burst of the dot com boom.

> the AOL buyout of Time Warner

To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.

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

#212

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…

These companies are never, ever going to make their money back off of retail customers. It's not even clear if those customers would be profitable at all, let alone enough to justify hundreds of billions in capital expenditures.

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

#213
post #171

I have a feeling that as soon as OpenAI and Anthropic stocks are up for grabs, the market will implode.

Maybe lay down some concrete numbers and timelines, hold yourself accountable, otherwise you risk confirmation bias with your predictions like millions before you.

"Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

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

#214
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like the SpaceX/Anthropic deal I understand the scepticism around Google's deal with SpaceX, given the former holds a stake in the latter. But Anthropic buying SpaceX's compute doesn't have any related-party smell to it. That genuinely looks like SpaceX having cornered some valuable compute.

Google owns 14% of Anthropic.

[deleted]

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's nice way to say "invested in AI that turned out to be flop nobody wants to pay for so they are selling spare capacity" Both takes are true. xAI invested in capacity that was supposed to yield frontier-model-maker margins. Grok failed to generate enough interest. So now they're selling it. That's absolutely a good business, in a way that's more certain than the frontier-model one. But it's also lower margin,…

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…

> because all the inputs are commodities

AI compute hardware is not a commodity. And in a shortage, commodities can command high margins.

xAI has lots of NVIDIA GPUs and HBM. It also has permits and power hook-ups, both things that are getting harder to come by day by day in the U.S. Natural gas is a commodity. Doesn't make having lots of right now bad business.

> the whole game is hoping that they hope to charge more now because people can't build fast enough and try to recoup their upfront costs before either a) other capacity comes online and b) the installed hardware becomes obsolete

Correct. But charging people now generates incumbency advantages that make beating (a) and (b) easier. (From what I can tell, (b) isn't an existential issue, at least for xAI, because they've basically already recouped their investment with commited contracts they'd have to fuck up on to lose.)

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that the rule changes which would allow SpaceX to be auto bought by those funds has been blocked, previous stock seasoning rules will apply

> the rule changes which would allow SpaceX to be auto bought by those funds has been blocked Nothing was blocked. S&P 500 never adopted them. Influencers misunderstood what a consultation document is and presented a question as a fait accompli . NASDAQ 100 changed its rules, as did S&P and Russell's total-market funds. But for NASDAQ 100 I'm going to go ahead and say this was a brilliant market move, since nobody ev…

> But for NASDAQ 100 I'm going to go ahead and say this was a brilliant market move, since nobody ever talked about that index before this.

Most people know the NASDAQ100 as its ticker QQQ. Also known as the high risk - high reward investment.

After reading how Nasdaq changed the rules in order to court all the mega IPOs to list with them, I will never ever consider a Nasdaq fund again. The rule change about the available float is especially shocking.

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

#217

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

> If SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic get fast tracked to be on NASDAQ or S&P 500

S&P 500 said no. NASDAQ 100 is a tiny tech index. The retirement conspiracy could have been a thing, and its effect isn't zero, but oh my god was it overblown by the influencer crowd.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the rule changes which would allow SpaceX to be auto bought by those funds has been blocked Nothing was blocked. S&P 500 never adopted them. Influencers misunderstood what a consultation document is and presented a question as a fait accompli . NASDAQ 100 changed its rules, as did S&P and Russell's total-market funds. But for NASDAQ 100 I'm going to go ahead and say this was a brilliant market move, since nobody ev…

> But for NASDAQ 100 I'm going to go ahead and say this was a brilliant market move, since nobody ever talked about that index before this. Most people know the NASDAQ100 as its ticker QQQ. Also known as the high risk - high reward investment. After reading how Nasdaq changed the rules in order to court all the mega IPOs to list with them, I will never ever consider a Nasdaq fund again. The rule change about the avai…

> After reading how Nasdaq changed the rules in order to court all the mega IPOs to list with them, I will never ever consider a Nasdaq fund again

We have zero evidence for that chain of causation. And we have zero evidence of significant outflows for NASDAQ 100 since this rule change. (There is early evidence of inflows, but I suspect that's just because nobody talked about the NASDAQ 100 before and this turned out to be a brilliant marketing move.)

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Both OpenAI and Anthropic were able to raise astronomical amount of cash on the private markets just weeks ago. I don't think that's what's driving them.

I really think what is driving this is the need for insiders, employees, early investors to be able to sell their stock at scale before the music stops.

And You can only do that through a full IPO. All those companies had private secondary transaction but none of them were big enough to transfer the Trillions of $ required for the insiders to unload their bags.

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

#220
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.

Apple has completely dropped the ball on every single detail of AI rollout for the last 5 years - why do you think they will suddenly stop now? My prior is that the new siri stuff is just as vaporware as the previous "apple intelligence" rollout
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