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OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

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291–300 of 426 posts

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#291

I was wrong - not investing in FB and Amazon many years ago - thought those businesses will shrivel and die. I believe OpenAI is a bit of a coin flip as the AI space evolves. In fact I feel all AI will be marginal return generators at best. There are a lot of incumbents and a lot more coming as barriers to entry get increasingly lower. Unless a company can build a near monopoly it'll be hard to justify a 100X revenue…

Everyone forgets that Amazon, Google, eBay had tens of competitors at the time. We only remember the winners.

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#292
post #110

I'd be willing to make this a ban-bet, but my prediction is that either OpenAI or SpaceX's IPO will flop and that will be the signal that will start the new stock market crash. When it happens people will point at how obvious it was with the war and the bubble going for a while. But these 2 mega IPOs back to back will be interesting to follow.

Has there been any good recent ipo’s?

They’re all down significantly from the date of going public.

I don’t really see how the price of OAI et al can go up - it’s already richly priced! The only way is down imo. But how much?

Considering how much they were priced a year ago even dropping 20% wouldn’t be bad… it’d be bad for insiders if the drop prolongs prior to the lock up period which is long enough to cause an even steeper drop. Also depending on the float - any non public trading shares face an illiquidity discount.

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't SpaceX the only one of those that actually makes money?

Personally, I don't worry about profitability in the short term. If Anthropic is adding $15b ARR every single month, and their gross margins are 50%+ (per Dario), profits are inevitable. The thing I'm most worried about with SpaceX is bundling X.com, xAI with it. I don't want to invest in X.com nor xAI. Lastly, I don't my money tied to the Elon rollercoaster.

How are the margins 50%+?

There's an article from today where if they double their current revenue to $10.9B they will make ~$500M profit. Maybe I just can't count, but that's a margin of ~5% no?

These numbers should be inference only: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-nears-first-quart...

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd spend a year in Japan just to see what it's like There's laws and shit about that. You can't just immigrate to a country illegally.

with enough money, anything is possible

2m isn't going to make Japan allow more than 6 months of stay in a year on a tourist visa. It might be enough to hide yourself from deportation, though who knows what happens when you try to leave. It might be enough to convince a local to get into a sham marriage for spouse visa sponsorship.

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#295
post #263

Non profit files for IPO should be the headline.

I understand what you're saying, but strictly speaking is it fair to say they aren't profitable? Didn't they along with other participants of LLM-race invest heavily into the infrastructure and the said infra wasn't yet delivered. My understanding is that it's unreasonable to claim a hotel isn't profitable when they're still on the building stage. I do understand that we don't have enough energy to turn it on when al…

> they're still on the building stage

Eh... what's left to build? Actual AI?

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their moat is cuda and cuda libraries and everything built on top. When a new architecture drops, it's always PyTorch running on CUDA, other PyTorch backends are best effort, even if they reach feature parity, many industry power users went closer to the metal to squeeze performance and that stuff is too specific to Nvidia stuff. if there is something that will beat Nvidia, it won't be something reaching feature pari…

I don't understand why AMD can't offer a drop-in replacement for cuda which implements an identical API. How much actual diversity is there among standard AI workloads? I would expect this is an 80/20 thing where 80% of the workload uses 20% of the features. >Nvidia could just reduce their margins Commoditization is great for stock prices ;-)

3 things, they can, there is a precedent for that with Google v. Oracle for Java, and they have something!

AMD engineered something called HIP which is CUDA API compatible libraries that targets AMD's hardware, it's the closest thing we have for drop-in replacement to Nvidia's software moat.

It works for simple stuff but loses terribly for frontier kernels (like Flash Attention 3), novel approaches (e.g. Mamba) or networking (e.g. NCCL), also they are rough on the edges, so what you gain from GPU costs is lost in engineering cost.

My previous company tried to compete in this GPU game while putting effort to have a good software stack (Rivos), drop in replacement and cheaper with decent software.

But that vision was rough, any new player had to implement the bad APIs due to backward compatibility concerns, following specs wasn't sufficient as a lot of the AI stack was depending on observable effects (Hyrum's Law), and Nvidia simply just had a long head start, the company is now dead (acquired by Meta) and AFAIK there isn't another player.

Best case scenario AMD puts more effort into their software stack but I just think they do not have enough internal talent to compete.

Training will continue to be an Nvidia's thing and that's where most of the money sits, unless suddenly the AI research scene pivots to using JAX but I do not see it coming any time soon, if anything, I've seen internal efforts at Google to make PyTorch work nicely with TPUs. Some players like Anthropic started using JAX for training but all the small players are using Nvidia, I'm guessing it has something to do with Nvidia partnering aggressively with startups.

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#297

Looks like there is only limited money in the market and there is a race to get it first. Wonder if the free market concept should move the prices down in such a scenario?

> free market concept should move the prices down

Kind of a radical idea. I did read about that in economy books way back when at uni... but I don't think it's really happening actual. At least my walled doesn't seem to get it.

PS: it's a joke, free market works when there is competition. VCs are making damn sure it's just enough monopolies that they get wealthier while consumers themselves get milked. Without antitrust actually being enforced, there is no free market.

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you just play games with other people? Do you really need _work_ to not feel lonely?

Gaming communities can be very toxic

Just like corporate jobs. The issue I have with the advice is I don't see why _working_ is supposed to be solution, rather than trying to find community somewhere else.

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does a company even consider this while the CFO is privately saying the books / revenue accounting are not ready for public scrutiny? Perhaps they will just tell a lot of lies. In the past people would generally avoid this when it came to stock market filings for fear of legal consequences, but the OpenAI C-Suite is already at least +$26 million to Trump and has plenty more to send his way if that doesn't cover…

Crime is legal, but investors can and will dissect your 10-Q/10-K statements. Anyway, I think that the Administration covering their asses in the face of doubtful numbers will shake investor confidence in the tech field. In fact, most investors will think one of these two things: 1. "Look, even OpenAI, which is the face of the LLM tech with ChatGPT, needs assistance from POTUS to stay afloat, the tech is not profitab…

Right, that's why TSLA is worth what... pennies? /s

Re: OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

#300
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, wasn't Japan's bubble in part due to easy credit? Are we going to see easy credit in the US given recent memories of inflation?

Quite possible that there will be a Trump effort to drive down rates and abandon inflation control for political reasons.

There already was such an effort but Trump lacks enough federal reserve votes to succeed at present.
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