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OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

cnbc.com

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Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#321

Post by yanhangyhy »

Rohansi wrote: post #298
try-working wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeChat is not a super app. It's a browser. Tencent WeChat is the equivalent of Google Chrome.

Is it a browser or like a browser? I've never actually used it but from what I understand WeChat's mini programs are like web apps but not something you can open up in a typical browser. Alternatively, you could say browsers are the original super app.

its a super app.

I think the core issue isn’t what underlying technology is used, but rather the service providers. They package their services into mobile apps or WeChat mini programs, and restrict functionality on browsers. For many ordinary people, this provides convenience, but for those who care more about privacy, it’s quite problematic.

WeChat in China covers almost every aspect of life. Even someone like me, who doesn’t want to use it often, can’t avoid it. Some restaurants’ online ordering systems only support scanning via WeChat—that is, WeChat mini programs. People can pay utility bills, call taxis, shop, and make financial investments all within WeChat. Alipay offers similar functions as well.

WeChat is also one of the largest content platforms in China, similar to Medium. Countless creators set up subscription accounts on WeChat and gain more users through readers’ sharing and reposting.At the same time, government information is often released through the WeChat platform.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#322

Post by esafak »

podgietaru wrote: post #108
simianwords wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you lack imagination. This is going to be the future because it is legitimately a step up from the previous ways of doing things. I can do things that were way more difficult before. It doesn't have to be AI all the way - no one's asking AI to book things on its own and make the payments on their own. What does work is, make AI do the research and you verify and you do the payment. Human in the loop. To me th…

Maybe there's a scenario where that is useful. But again, I don't know why I'd want an AI to do this research for me. I hop on Skyscanner. I type my location, and where I'd like to go. It presents me with a list of options, and I can then use the filters to find times that work best for me. I see a flight that isn't in my time frame, but is actually like 400 euros cheaper. And I decide in that moment that waking up a…

Think of personal assistants that rich people have. They learn your habits and take care of business, like making your travel plans. The promise is to give you that for much less.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#323

Post by gehwartzen »

Aurornis wrote: post #198
jmalicki wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am saying is that if you do meet the milestones from your previous round, you're going to have an easy time fundraising anyway, so funding contingent on milestones isn't that different than just saying "well, if we need more money we can do another round"

Fundraising rounds are difficult, laborious, and distracting. It would be extremely different to try to multiply the number of rounds by 3-5X. There's nothing easy about that. You're also ignoring that the market changes frequently. If you only raised as much money as you needed for the next 4-6 months with plans to re-raise all the time, you'd have to constantly be sizing your growth plans up or down based on how th…

It seems pretty simple:

Funding Round A: VC “A” invests 200M (100M immediately and another 100M if sales grow 10% or whatever)

At 6 months the company will either get the other 100M automatically (meaning they grew sales 10%) or they don’t (meaning they grew less than 10%).

Assuming it’s the later they can then do another round during which they try to get the other 100M. In all likelihood VC “A” won’t be interested (or interested at a lesser amount). They could go ask VC “B” for an investment but it will likely be less than 100M as well because they didn’t grow as much as “the market” anticipated.

Nothing complicated at all.

I’ll give you $1 dollar for your banana today and another dollar in a week when it has ripened. If it’s rotten when I come to get my banana I won’t give you the other dollar. You have your original $1 and you can still try to sell your rotten banana to another HN reader but you probably won’t get another dollar this time.If instead you have a ripe banana I’m sure you could easily find a buyer.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#325

Post by nl »

bandrami wrote: post #264
nl wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's well know everyone is making great money on inference . The cost is training. Whether GPT-5 was profitable to run depends on which profit margin you’re talking about. If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it seems to be about 30% — lower than the norm for software companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than many industries. (They go…

> It's well know everyone is making great money on inference. That is not, in fact, "well known", but based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work and at least look like they're soliciting a constant firehose of investment money simply to keep the lights on. In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before…

> based entirely on the announcements of the inference providers themselves who also get very cagey when asked to show their work

I mean sure, it's self reported.

But the inference prices somewhere like Fireworks or TogetherAI charges is comparable to what Google/AWS/Azure charge for the same model an we know they aren't losing money - they have public accounts that show it, eg:

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-resets-amazon-...

Fireworks’ gross margin—gross profit as a percentage of revenue—is roughly 50%, according to the same person

https://archive.is/Y26lA#selection-1249.65-1249.173

> In particular there's a troubling tendency to call revenue "recurring" before it actually, you know, recurs.

If someone has a subscription then yes that is pretty normal.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#326

Post by timr »

jacquesm wrote: post #226
triceratops wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me it seems since the financial crisis 2008 investors don't enjoy stocks as before Maybe in Europe. The US stock market has nearly tripled since then. Literally the best period of stock growth in history.

"The Roaring Twenties roared loudest and longest on the New York Stock Exchange. Share prices rose to unprecedented heights. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased six-fold from sixty-three in August 1921 to 381 in September 1929. After prices peaked, economist Irving Fisher proclaimed, "stock prices have reached 'what looks like a permanently high plateau.'" https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-mar…

You can argue that current market multiples are higher than 1929 [1] - and they're certainly high - but this also ignores the mechanism that drove that crash, focusing only on the symptoms. We simply aren't doing the kind of consumer margin buying that drove the '29 crash. It isn't even close. Average schlubs were leveraged to the stratosphere to buy shares of boring industrial stocks.

[1] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#327

Post by nl »

bandrami wrote: post #305
nl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point - exactly - of profit? Profit is money you can't find a use for to grow your business, so you give some of it to the government in the form of tax. Also there is a big difference between operational expenses and capital expenses like building data centers. I think OpenAI is being very aggressive on the growth vs conservative financial management spectrum but just saying "only profit should matter" i…

> What is the point - exactly - of profit? It's what attracts capital investment, which businesses need

OpenAI seems to do reasonably well at attracting capital investment without profits.

As did Amazon, Google, Meta etc etc.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#328

Post by jacquesm »

timr wrote: post #326
jacquesm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Roaring Twenties roared loudest and longest on the New York Stock Exchange. Share prices rose to unprecedented heights. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased six-fold from sixty-three in August 1921 to 381 in September 1929. After prices peaked, economist Irving Fisher proclaimed, "stock prices have reached 'what looks like a permanently high plateau.'" https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/stock-mar…

You can argue that current market multiples are higher than 1929 [1] - and they're certainly high - but this also ignores the mechanism that drove that crash, focusing only on the symptoms . We simply aren't doing the kind of consumer margin buying that drove the '29 crash. It isn't even close. Average schlubs were leveraged to the stratosphere to buy shares of boring industrial stocks. [1] https://www.multpl.com/shi…

> The US stock market has nearly tripled since then. Literally the best period of stock growth in history.

The only thing I meant to point out was that a very high stock price by itself is no guarantee that there isn't a crisis around the corner. We plugged a lot of holes after 2008 and then reversed a lot of those fixes, I hear retail investors talking about their stocks at birthday parties again. Deja vu... of course this time it will be different. Or not. Let's just say that with the proverbial bull in the earthenware goods store on the loose if we only end up with another financial crisis that might actually not be so bad.

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#329

Post by bandrami »

nl wrote: post #327
bandrami wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the point - exactly - of profit? It's what attracts capital investment, which businesses need

OpenAI seems to do reasonably well at attracting capital investment without profits. As did Amazon, Google, Meta etc etc.

OpenAI is great at attracting people who say "yeah, sure, I'll give you capital at some point in the future" who then never actually give them the capital (or at least haven't yet).

Re: OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

#330

Post by gunsle »

voganmother42 wrote: post #303
zmmmmm wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting strategy, I see a pretty big risk from them leaning into it like this. We already have a vibe in my circles of the old "gmail vs yahoo" type thing where if you saw someone had a yahoo mail address you assumed they were technologically illiterate. Similarly it's mildly embarrassing already to say you used ChatGPT for something. It's not unrecoverable, but it's a pretty steep slippery slope they pro…

After the DoD moves? It is not just the technologically illiterate, it is part of the US culture war. OpenAI is the MAGA brand, like tesla.

What an absurd leap. OpenAI is the maga brand because they simp for government contracts like any massive company would?
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