Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 359 posts

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#291

Post by andy99 »

IsTom wrote: post #288
deepdarkforest wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone. People are becoming dependent on chatgpt. They literally cannot function professionally or even socially without it. They will pay their last 20-30 dollars if needed. It's literally like a drug especially when it's asking you if you want to followup/continue.

At least one of us is inside a bubble. Nobody I interact with regularly uses chatgpt for anything more than novelty. Even people who used it as glorified google for looking up things reduced their use.

There are definitely big?bubbles where everyone has outsourced their thinking to AI. I’d like to think it’s mostly at the lower end of “knowledge work” - think Deloitte, but it seems that even people / orgs that you would expect more critical thinking of are using it uncritically.

Of course this all occurs in a very small segment of society, I think the majority of people don’t really use it, and certainly haven’t moved any of their day-to-day thinking over to it.

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#292

Post by [deleted] »

IsTom wrote: post #288
deepdarkforest wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone. People are becoming dependent on chatgpt. They literally cannot function professionally or even socially without it. They will pay their last 20-30 dollars if needed. It's literally like a drug especially when it's asking you if you want to followup/continue.

At least one of us is inside a bubble. Nobody I interact with regularly uses chatgpt for anything more than novelty. Even people who used it as glorified google for looking up things reduced their use.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#293

Post by x187463 »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #278
deepdarkforest wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone. People are becoming dependent on chatgpt. They literally cannot function professionally or even socially without it. They will pay their last 20-30 dollars if needed. It's literally like a drug especially when it's asking you if you want to followup/continue.

Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads. So far it is unclear, if this is also a viable option for chatgpt.

YouTube Premium has over 125 million subscribers.

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#294

Post by HighGoldstein »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #278
deepdarkforest wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone. People are becoming dependent on chatgpt. They literally cannot function professionally or even socially without it. They will pay their last 20-30 dollars if needed. It's literally like a drug especially when it's asking you if you want to followup/continue.

Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads. So far it is unclear, if this is also a viable option for chatgpt.

> Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads.

A lot of people already pay for YouTube since the introduction of Premium. Google/Facebook don't push for paid versions of these products because the data from billions of "free" users is more valuable to them than payments from millions of paid users.

If Google search were paywalled (pre-AI) the most likely outcome would be a separation of consumers into "premium" customers paying for Google, some people paying for cheaper but not quite as good alternatives, and everyone else getting by with the free alternatives. There would also likely be some kind of enterprise tier for indexing your corporate resources or some such.

There's a reason Adobe is still extracting billions from its ~~victims~~ users despite many great free (or reasonably priced) alternatives existing.

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#295

Post by ozozozd »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #102
brokencode wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but most of the country’s AI talent is concentrated there. Not to mention venture capital. What’s the advantage of moving? Maybe lower taxes and a cheaper rent. That seems like a small price to pay compared to the hundreds of billions they’re putting into data centers.

They're concentrated there because they've been asked to concentrate there. That can change on a dime. It's not like data centers are mainly in SF.

Anecdotal evidence: I moved to CA twice as an engineer.

Once to get my masters after college. Stayed for 13 years. Left during COVID.

Second time to raise kids.

Our reasons include weather, intellectual atmosphere, safety (in many regards), schools, and job opportunities.

The geo area sandwiched between Berkeley and Stanford is only rivaled by Boston. You think Stanford and Berkeley are in the Bay because they’re told to?

And I would also question: what’s the point of living in US if you’re not in California? Once you decide to not live in CA, a bunch of other countries rank better than other US states. Such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

If I were to not live in CA, even the imperial units would quickly become annoying.

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#296

Post by gsibble »

tim333 wrote: post #275
andy99 wrote: post #172

IPO is to leave someone holding the bag, right? The narrative has really changed from AGI, the most consequential technology, blabla. If I had that I would keep it private. If I wanted to cash out, I’d do an IPO. Is there a narrative that doesn’t make it seem like pump and dump?

I was watching the OpenAI livestream yesterday. Sam was saying they have a $1.4 tn financial obligation to build 30 GW worth of data centers https://youtu.be/ngDCxlZcecw?t=1179 That's a lot of money to raise given they have no earnings. He also says they are talking about being able to build 1 GW a week at a cost of $20bn/GW I find it all a bit worrying. Weren't we supposed to be careful with energy use to reduce CO2…

You didn't notice as soon as energy was needed for AI, all the tech companies gave up on green power and reducing emissions?

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#297

Post by bix6 »

CPLX wrote: post #202
terminalshort wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to downplay the network effects here, but it's in CA entirely by coincidence. SV is in CA because William Shockley's family is there, which is why he founded Shockley Semiconductor there. It could have been somewhere else. The 2nd largest tech hub is in Seattle. It's there because that's were Bill Gates is from. Is SF the best place to start a startup if you want in office talent in 2025. 100% yes, but t…

It goes back way way further than that. The special mix of government funded technology, ruthless entrepreneurship, and social engineering predates Shockley by almost 100 years. Start by figuring out who Leland Stanford is and how he got rich. Read the book ‘Palo Alto’ if you’re looking for a good starting point.

Just borrowed thanks for the rec!

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#298

Post by FinnKuhn »

x187463 wrote: post #293
FinnKuhn wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads. So far it is unclear, if this is also a viable option for chatgpt.

YouTube Premium has over 125 million subscribers.

Out of about 2.7 billion users. So about 5% of all users are subscribed to YouTube.

If the same were true then Open AI at 1 billion weekly users they should have about 50 million subscribers. Right now that numbers sits at 20 million though and growth is slowing down. [1]

So people are more willing to pay for YouTube than ChatGPT and that is ignoring that YouTube is still largely relying on ad revenue and can only allow itself to have more and more ads as there are no alternatives. Open AI has plenty of competitors that would love to offer users free access if ChatGPT were to start showing you ads.

[1] https://fortune.com/2025/10/14/openai-subscriptions-flatline...

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#299

Post by gadders »

adastra22 wrote: post #39
fourseventy wrote: post #17

How can a non-profit IPO? I know that technically OpenAI is a for-profit company that is owned by a non-profit, but I still don't get it.

It is being restructured to no longer be a nonprofit, but a for-benefit corporation instead. That is why California's approval was required (and IMO is just as corrupt as it sounds).

"OpenAI and Microsoft have made their next move in their attempt to expropriate the OpenAI nonprofit and pull off one of the largest thefts in human history."

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-134-if-anyone-reads-it?open...

Re: OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO

#300

Post by seanhunter »

yellow_postit wrote: post #100
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain to me why California would believe Sam Altman plans to stay in California? The simple answer is unless developing LLMs becomes commoditised, the best place in the world to do it is in San Francisco. You don't take your manufacturing business out of Shenzhen without very good reason.

The Texas Stock Exchange launches next year and I predict we will see a lot of tech try to move to launch there given txse claim to have lower compliance and less esg needs.

You know that Nasdaq isn't in Silicon Valley right? Lots of companies are based in the valley, listed in either CA or Delaware and go on to list in NYC now. There's no compelling reason for them to move to Texas.

As for the compliance thing it remains to be seen, but generally companies in low-compliance jurisdictions trade at a "fraud discount" to compensate investors for the likelihood of untoward shenanigans that would be prevented by that compliance.

Post reply on HN