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OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

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

#461

Post by dionidium »

aurareturn wrote: post #185
hirako2000 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons. They somewhat broke even, and kept getting investment. The potential for quasi monopoly was obvious. Openai can't claim either.

How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit. Uber was only on a path to monopoly in the US, not world wide. It’s lost to local competitors in most countries. And it can get disrupted by self driving cars soon. OpenAI’s SOTA LLM training smells like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me. The cost to train the smartest models keep increasing. Most competitors will bow out as they do not have t…

> How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.

It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.

These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.

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

#462

Post by lelanthran »

seanhunter wrote: post #436
lelanthran wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The $24b figure is literally in OpenAI's announcement. And? That's not a legislated report; they can use whatever mechanism they want to, without disclosure, to produce numbers. Lets wait until they are regulated as a public company, then their mechanism has to be both aligned with what legislation requires as well as clearly documented in their report.

> they can use whatever mechanism they want to, without disclosure, to produce numbers. That would be fraud against whoever participated in this round, so no. Just because they aren't regulated doesn't mean they are literally free to do whatever they want to close the round.

> Just because they aren't regulated doesn't mean they are literally free to do whatever they want to close the round.

What makes you think their public announcements are aligned with what they give prospective investors?

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

#463

Post by empath75 »

natas wrote: post #342
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…

OpenAI is a few years behind Anthropic, and it's unlikely they'll catch up at this point.

Anthropic is _unquestionably_ ahead product wise because of their agentic coding tools, but they are not _years_ ahead. In particular, their advantage is in the harness, which is not hard to replicate!

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

#464

Post by bluecalm »

gavinray wrote: post #20
nemo1618 wrote: post #7

I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...? At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.

> At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. I had to look this up. There's a venture fund you can invest in with as little as $500 as a consumer -- though it's limited to quarterly withdrawals. https://www.ark-funds.com/funds/arkvx The fund is invested in most of the hot tech companies.

ARK funds has cult like following but then again they are a typical high beta player who outperforms in hot markets and heavily underperforms in cold ones. Fees are high. The CEO (CIO) is a women who looks for investment advice in the Bible and asks God for his thoughts (I am not joking).

If anything being associated with ARK in any form is a big negative signal.

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

#465

Post by satvikpendem »

zx8080 wrote: post #313
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #57

No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. A big chunk of that $122B is a "maybe" that depends on various things that need to happen in the future. Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.

> No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. What is this about? The title says "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation". It does not mention $122B. Edit: the linked page's title is different and indeed states $122B.

Mods on HN sometimes change the titles of submissions to be more neutral but they generally start off as the linked article's title, which is what the comment you're replying to was referring to.

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

#466

Post by satvikpendem »

nine_k wrote: post #14
nemo1618 wrote: post #7

I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...? At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.

I think this is reality-distortion field rivaling that of Jobs', and a crisis of faith. Nobody apparently believes that capital is worth investing into anything but AI.

And not even actual capital either, as much of the investment amounts into AI have been through cloud and GPU credits so that AWS or Microsoft Azure don't actually have to hand over billions in straight cash.

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

#467

Post by riskable »

willio58 wrote: post #388
dmix wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still a huge amount of revenue for any company. Those $20/month fees are going to triple in a couple yrs. But the VCs expect much much more.

Friends of mine working in AI companies are saying we’ll be lucky if they only triple. More like 10-20x long term, especially for enterprise

This assumes that these companies aren't going to use smaller providers or hosting models themselves. THAT is the great big assumption going into all the Big AI funding.

I think it's a very, very bad assumption. After trying GLM-5 and Qwen3 on Ollama Cloud, not only were they faster than OpenAI's offerings (by a huge amount) it was just as good if not better at doing what I asked of it.

Claude Code is still superior to anything else but GLM-5 and Qwen3 are easily just as good as GPT-5.X (for coding).

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

#468

Post by rafaelmn »

empath75 wrote: post #463
natas wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is a few years behind Anthropic, and it's unlikely they'll catch up at this point.

Anthropic is _unquestionably_ ahead product wise because of their agentic coding tools, but they are not _years_ ahead. In particular, their advantage is in the harness, which is not hard to replicate!

Lol if CC is the advantage that's the larges indictment of AI coding there is. Don't get me wrong CC gives me good results, but I very much doubt their tooling is great, they just spew tokens at the model and the model is quite good at making sense of it and following through.

I suspect they have better RL setup for coding that makes their models better at coding than GPT/Gemini in practice.

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

#469

Post by aurareturn »

nutjob2 wrote: post #460
aurareturn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re downvoted. Everyone wants to treat OpenAI like a car wash business where they need to make a profit almost immediately. I don’t know why people can’t understand that the industry is in a rapid growth stage and investing the money is more important than making a profit now. The profits will come later.

> The profits will come later. The nearly $1T hand wave. Forgive me if I ask how. Might give it some credence if Anthropic and Google weren't pulling even with or surpassing them in various way or markets. Whats worse is they mostly seem to have retail market name recognition which is arguably the hardest, or maybe the impossible market to make money from.

  Whats worse is they mostly seem to have retail market name recognition which is arguably the hardest, or maybe the impossible market to make money from.
That doesn't seem to be the case at all. Meta and Google are two of the most profitable companies in history, off the backs of free users.

Apple is another one that focuses almost exclusively on retail and is also one of the most profitable in history.

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

#470

Post by dragonwriter »

stingraycharles wrote: post #439
dragonwriter wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn’t sales tax only for consumers? It depends how you defined “consumers”. If you mean “those who consume the good subject to the tax, rather than people who resell the good”, yes, ideally. If you mean “not businesses” or “individuals but not corporations”, then, no. > Ie companies reverse charge sales tax or omit it entirely. Generally, the theory of sales taxes is that people (including corporations) pay sales t…

That’s interesting, that’s not the case in the EU. Here, as long as you can argue that it’s a business expense, you don’t have to pay sales tax. Eg the internal documents are a necessary expense / cost of doing business.

My understanding is that EU nations all have VAT, not sales tax; both are broadly consumption taxes, but they function rather differently (VAT charged at each stage of production vs sales tax only at final sale to consumer, among other differences.). VAT is sort of opposite of sales tax for businesses as payers; they pay VAT on goods bought as production inputs (and collect it on behalf of government on items they sell downstream on the chain of production), but do not pay it on what they consume for internal operations (in effect, to the extent thise internal operations contribute to the value added to the product, that is what the people downstream in the chain of production are paying VAT for.)
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