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OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

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Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#251

Post by fwip »

jpadkins wrote: post #248
WJW wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value…

if you can identify where and how prediction markets are wrong, why aren't you applying that and making millions? > - Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome. Citation? If your small population is high IQ, accurate…

> why aren't you applying that and making millions?

Knowing that something is a lousy predictor doesn't mean that you have a better one.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#252

Post by sph »

WJW wrote: post #243
lelanthran wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is this supposed to imply? Wisdom of the crowd, same as guessing jellybeans in a jar. The exact average is wrong, but it's still pretty damn close because the guesses are likely to follow a normal distribution. If the hump of the normal distribution of these guesses is around 4% (or whatever) odds on, the actual answer is unlikely to be far from that. > You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting wit…

Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value…

> It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead.

This makes intuitive sense to me; is there a name for this phenomenon?

A prediction platform’s biggest value is publicising information from possible insiders, who at some point will work harder to maintain secrecy not to lose their informational advantage. So all that remains are people gambling on public info.

That said, greed from insiders looking to make a quick buck will always skew the price towards ‘truth’

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#253

Post by wat10000 »

some_random wrote: post #246
WJW wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value…

The question isn't "will they IPO" the question is "when will they IPO" which is not a binary question. The rest of your point about Polymarket users now being mostly degenerate gamblers is true though.

It’s two binary questions about whether they will IPO by specific dates. It’s not obvious to me that this maps to a more granular “when will they IPO?” question.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#254

Post by c7b »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #203
smcin wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polymarket (for whatever it's worth) currently has OpenAI IPO at only 4% by end June and 40% by end December (and that's even for a small-float IPO as has become common). https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-by

What is this supposed to imply? You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting without understanding who is betting and why. Well, I suppose you can draw the conclusion that "polymarket customers are interested in this topic"

The Venn diagram of people who have deep understanding of capital markets and people who like betting on stuff will have non-negligible overlap. Read some of the stories about Wall Street, especially from before it was all algorithms. Moreover, evidence of apparent insider trading on Polymarket, specifically for OpenAI, has already been shared on HN. Sounds pretty crazy to me to suggest that those odds can't tell us anything about the true probabilities. What's your reasoning?

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#255

Post by wat10000 »

lelanthran wrote: post #249
WJW wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value…

> An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to. Of course there is - they are betting on the "when". > It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. I dunno how to reply to this - that is exactly my point, but it appears (to me, anyway) that you are…

They’re not betting on when, they’re betting on if with a time limit.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#256

Post by smcin »

some_random wrote: post #246
WJW wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value…

The question isn't "will they IPO" the question is "when will they IPO" which is not a binary question. The rest of your point about Polymarket users now being mostly degenerate gamblers is true though.

The relative timing, valuations (and float sizes) of the expected SpaceX, Anthropic and then OpenAI IPOs would still be highly correlated. Even allowing for moral degeneracy among most of the gamblers on this particular Polymarket market.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#257

Post by Esophagus4 »

lelanthran wrote: post #241
Esophagus4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst are the ones who say things like “OpenAI only has 5% paying users!” As if that’s a really bad number. That is the same ratio YouTube, the world’s largest media company, has. And ChatGPT has like 800m users after only a few years of existence. And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram… Some people are really rooting for the downfall of Op…

> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram… Don't all those examples have network effects as a moat? As in, once the userbase is in, they lose quite a lot of value by switching to a competitor. What value does a ChatGPT user lose by switching to a competitor?

Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users?

Do you really believe that in your heart of hearts? Or are you trying to be the HN comment contrarian?

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#258

Post by Esophagus4 »

username223 wrote: post #185
Esophagus4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst are the ones who say things like “OpenAI only has 5% paying users!” As if that’s a really bad number. That is the same ratio YouTube, the world’s largest media company, has. And ChatGPT has like 800m users after only a few years of existence. And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram… Some people are really rooting for the downfall of Op…

> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram… Enshittification only works for the middleman in a two-sided market, which is what those things are. LLMs are a commodity, so their path to monopoly profit is very different.

I will check back on this comment in a year to see who was right.

The only people that care about enshittification are a few crazies on HN.

Google has 90% market share.

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#259

Post by lelanthran »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #257
lelanthran wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And “once they sell ads, they’ll lose all their users!” As if that happened to FB, Google, YouTube, or Instagram… Don't all those examples have network effects as a moat? As in, once the userbase is in, they lose quite a lot of value by switching to a competitor. What value does a ChatGPT user lose by switching to a competitor?

Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users? Do you really believe that in your heart of hearts? Or are you trying to be the HN comment contrarian?

> Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users?

I didn't say I believed that, I said that the reasons provided (for people to stick with it) were, to me, insufficient reasons.

The examples of people sticking with a product undergoing enshittification are not representative of the type of product that ChatGPT is. Those other products you mentioned had a strong moat - network effects.

Users had to stick with them, or lose their network.

AI Chat is, almost by definition, a non-network product. When you switch you don't lose updates from your friends, you don't lose subscribers to your channel, you don't lose your followers.

So, what exactly does someone lose when switching from AI Chat $FOO to AI Chat $BAR? Those saved conversations aren't exactly worth much, those "memories" that the Chat AI stored about you aren't worth much either (I was surprised at how many people thought those saved chats didn't contribute to the responses they get in the current chat).

Re: OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

#260

Post by Esophagus4 »

lelanthran wrote: post #259
Esophagus4 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users? Do you really believe that in your heart of hearts? Or are you trying to be the HN comment contrarian?

> Do you really believe ChatGPT will lose significant users? I didn't say I believed that, I said that the reasons provided (for people to stick with it) were, to me, insufficient reasons. The examples of people sticking with a product undergoing enshittification are not representative of the type of product that ChatGPT is. Those other products you mentioned had a strong moat - network effects. Users had to stick wi…

I just can’t imagine anyone really bothering to switch, tbh. Even for a less enshittified product. For a better product, sure. Like if Google hadn’t rolled out Gemini in Search, ChatGPT would’ve crushed them. But not because of lack of ads in ChatGPT, because it was a better search product.

Google Search doesn’t have a network effect right? And people still tolerate their ads… they have 90% marketshare.

People still tolerate Netflix and Hulu ads right?

I think the only people that really care about enshittificafion are a few HN commenters and not broadly represented in the population.

Even at my company, our testing shows no drop in usage as we roll out ads.

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