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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

#441

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

aurareturn wrote: post #216
vlovich123 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of copying SOTA models though is super cheap and doesn’t take super long.

How do you distill when OpenAI and Anthropic inevitably move to tasks running in the cloud? IE. Go buy this extremely hard to get concert ticket for me. Distilling might only be effective in the chat bot dominant era. We are about to move to an agents era. Furthermore, I’m guessing distilling will get harder and harder. Claude Code leak shows some primitive anti distilling methods already. There’s research showing th…

even ignoring distillation, so long as hardware or ml get better over time, training a new model from scratch is cheaper the later you do it

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

#443

Post by interludead »

aurareturn wrote: post #58

$2b/month which is $24b/year. Not as much as I expected considering they were at $20b by end of 2025.[0] They only added $4b since? Anthropic had $19b by end of February 2026 and they added $6b in February alone.[1] This means if they added another $6b in March, they're higher than OpenAI already. However, I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue in a different way. OpenAI takes 20% of revenue from Azure sale…

I'd be pretty cautious comparing those numbers directly

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

#444

Post by interludead »

alyxya wrote: post #31

> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor investe…

I think this is more about deal structure than spin

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

#445

Post by interludead »

samdjstephens wrote: post #23

> The broad consumer reach of ChatGPT creates a powerful distribution channel into the workplace They mention this line in different forms a couple of times in the article. It’s clear they’re pretty rattled about Anthropic’s momentum in enterprise, I wonder how confident they really are in this rationale.

I don't read that as "rattled" so much as leaning into the one thing they clearly have that Anthropic doesn't: massive consumer distribution

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

#446

Post by interludead »

mrdependable wrote: post #36

Funny how quickly they have become like every other tech company. There is basically no hint of OpenAI the non-profit anymore. Edit: Why did this go from their press release to a news story?

Frontier AI + tens of billions in capex was always going to end here

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

#447

Post by lmm »

aurareturn wrote: post #431
lmm wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon had a clear business model. They had positive gross margin from, if not day 1, then pretty close to it. I remain skeptical of Uber. Sure, maybe OpenAI and Anthropic will make it work. It's not impossible. But it's far from guaranteed.

OpenAI and Anthropic have positive gross margins for inference. Uber generates about $1b in profit yearly now.

> OpenAI and Anthropic have positive gross margins for inference.

Maybe, if you take their word for it, and treat the models as capital assets rather than part of the COGS for the inference product. That's pretty far off from where Amazon was at.

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

#448

Post by hrimfaxi »

evgen wrote: post #401
kevinqi wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's guaranteed to work, but the strategy is real. I know Notion won vs. competitors in the space because they focused on consumer first, and consumers then brought Notion into their workplaces.

I am amused that you think IT is going to respond to an unmanaged LLM tool that operates outside of the LLM policies all serious enterprises have set up by now and say 'wow, that is cool and maybe we should buy in to this!' What is going to happen is that the emplyee who tries to sneak OpenAI into our org is going to have two meetings set up by the end of the day, one with IT to ensure the whatever tool they installe…

What if that employee is in the C-suite?

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

#449

Post by ef3dfd »

Bombthecat wrote: post #428
mrweasel wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I read it as the number of subscribers would triple, but you're suggesting the price will? That makes a little more sense, because the number of subscribers are so low that tripling won't really make much difference in terms of turning a profit.

It's for companies to replace people. Works out ok for them. Even four times isn't that much

Its simply not going to happen. People like Nadella call it 'tacit knowledge' - the reality is the work people do is much broader than what is producible by LLMs alone. Without the human, there is no work done. Unlike classic machinery, LLMs are not comparable in that you cant simply reduce labour input by X and be fine. Sure in the short term the consequences will not show up, but in the long term they will.

Altman and co. get down on their knees and pray that proposition is only transitory in the short run.

LLMs wont disappear, but they wont be large profit generators either. Especially not so whilst there is fierce competition and every dollar of profit is re-invested. The value of an asset is derived upon its potential cash return, net of reinvestment, taxes et al.

Altman is hoping to survive long enough to finance R&D to figure out how to encode the entirety of what humans do, to be able to come good on the asinine aspirations he has put forth that justify its valuation. But it will end in disaster.

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

#450

Post by ef3dfd »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #441
aurareturn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you distill when OpenAI and Anthropic inevitably move to tasks running in the cloud? IE. Go buy this extremely hard to get concert ticket for me. Distilling might only be effective in the chat bot dominant era. We are about to move to an agents era. Furthermore, I’m guessing distilling will get harder and harder. Claude Code leak shows some primitive anti distilling methods already. There’s research showing th…

even ignoring distillation, so long as hardware or ml get better over time, training a new model from scratch is cheaper the later you do it

Yep the poster is assuming efficiencies will not come.

Absolutely they will. And this is a huge problem for OAI - given Google is targeting vertical integration, they will acquire a cost-advantage. As long as the model performance is good enough, they will kick OAI and Anthropic out in the long-run.

The valuations of OAI and Anthropic are nonsense. A true valuation would incorporate failure risk, which is natural for startups/fast growing and money losing firms. Anyone who takes them serious is incredibly delusional.

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