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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

#511

Post by boppo1 »

PunchTornado wrote: post #481
serf wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your ethics. let's not forget that these major LLMs are all the children of corporate hyper-piracy en masse, none of them are ethical even in origin unless you're talking about the pre-product company charter kind of ethics, like google .

You can't put anthropic and openai in the same basket regarding ethics. One accepted Department of War's conditions and the other not.

Last I heard, claude was the model powering maven when it bombed that school. Most aren't up-to date on that because anthropic launders their culpability through palanntir. Anthropic is better at optics not ethics.

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

#512

Post by parineum »

voganmother42 wrote: post #508
parineum wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware that it happened. You seem under the impression that this is some kind of mass exodus based on people you know. Uninstalls up 300%! What's the baseline? > downloads fell 13% on day one and a further 5% the next day Dramatic falloff of new downloads after one day (still plenty of new downloads). Day 3 was likely negligible and, I bet, it was back to normal less than a week after when the story left the news…

Ahh I see, you possess the superior bubble, how silly of me!

I didn't say that, I just brought that up to contrast it to yours.

The strongest part of my argument goes with your cited 1.5m number. That's not a lot of people, especially when you consider the signing of a petition requires no other action than signing and has no way to verify the signing.

I'm just not seeing how any of this harmed OpenAI more than a government contract helps.

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

#513

Post by nsingh2 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #501
nsingh2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a big exaggeration. Codex is probably one of the top two LLM programming tools, along with Claude Code. GPT-5.4 models are strong, unlike the initial GPT-5 ones, which were comparatively bad, and can hold up against Opus 4.6. In my experience, they are better at analytical work. I cannot really see how they are "far behind," or how some plugin for Claude Code is a "last desperate bid." The tools are close enough…

They were years ahead. They managed to generate competitors (Anthropic is OpenAI refugees) by alienating their own employees by being so dishonest and immoral when compared to their own founding principals and even legal documents. They experienced a coup where the primary technical vision of the company was forced out in favor of someone who is comparatively a nontechnical dummy. That was the beginning of the multip…

> They were years ahead.

Considering how fast competitors caught up to them, I'm not convinced that OpenAI was years ahead. LLMs and transformers were known technology, it's just that OpenAI accidentally productized it before others did (ChatGPT). This is not an advantage measured in years. Google, for example, could have caught up to them pretty easily (they invented the transformer architecture), I think it mostly came down to mismanagement that they flopped so hard with Bard. The biggest cost was high quality data, Google certainly had that, and a budget for huge training runs. I really don't think OpenAI had any special sauce that made them years ahead.

One confounder here is that LLM scaling has started to hit diminished returns recently, no more GPT3 -> GPT4/o1 jumps in recent times, making it easier to catch up to the SOTA.

That schism within the OpenAI leadership was ugly. And Sam Altman does seem to be a bit snakey to me. But I have no illusions about any company in this space, including Antropic. None of these companies are moral, given what data these models are trained on.

> their competitors caught up and then passed them by

The different models are more capable in different aspects, but they are close enough together that only in a few months they leapfrog each other.

> OpenAI is floundering and can't sustain their own burn rate. Their competitors are thriving.

Google is thriving, sure, but not because of Gemini, it's because of their existing ads business. I would not say that about Anthropic, they seem to be struggling to provide enough compute (with the recent usage limit changes). Hard to know whats happening funding wise in these companies. Saying that their competitors are thriving is a stretch. And again, if the AI bubble pops, Antropic is gonna hurt along with OpenAI. Just not clear to what extent.

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

#514

Post by ltbarcly3 »

nsingh2 wrote: post #513
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were years ahead. They managed to generate competitors (Anthropic is OpenAI refugees) by alienating their own employees by being so dishonest and immoral when compared to their own founding principals and even legal documents. They experienced a coup where the primary technical vision of the company was forced out in favor of someone who is comparatively a nontechnical dummy. That was the beginning of the multip…

> They were years ahead. Considering how fast competitors caught up to them, I'm not convinced that OpenAI was years ahead. LLMs and transformers were known technology, it's just that OpenAI accidentally productized it before others did (ChatGPT). This is not an advantage measured in years. Google, for example, could have caught up to them pretty easily (they invented the transformer architecture), I think it mostly…

Their competitors caught up after about 3 years though. Gemini 2.5 was more or less awful vs even GPT 3/4. Models have more than one measure of quality so they don't cleanly totally order, but Gemini 2.5 was awful. Gemini 3.1 is better than GPT 5.3 and competitive with 5.4 and preceded it by months.

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

#515

Post by cluckindan »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #473
throwaway2037 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For other readers, I want to add some context here. NASDAQ is pondering whether or not to change their NASDAQ 100 index membership rules for IPOs. Currently, there is a three month waiting rule for IPOs. They are proposing (not sure if passed/agree/completed yet) to remove this waiting rule for IPOs. Real question: What is the real impact of this rule change? To me, it seems so minor. Three months is just a blip in t…

The "corruption" allegation is that for, yes, SpaceX, index funds will effectively be "forced" to buy in right away at their IPO price, rather than seeing where they settle before getting the money in. Given that most people have most of their money in index funds, it's sort-of an automatic buy and raises some hackles about a fixed game. Saying "you can trade the basket yourself minus the names you don't like" is not…

”Given that most people have most of their money in index funds”

”Most people” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there; 52% in the US and just 25-30% globally invest their money

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

#516

Post by PunchTornado »

boppo1 wrote: post #511
PunchTornado wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't put anthropic and openai in the same basket regarding ethics. One accepted Department of War's conditions and the other not.

Last I heard, claude was the model powering maven when it bombed that school. Most aren't up-to date on that because anthropic launders their culpability through palanntir. Anthropic is better at optics not ethics.

No matter what you say, you know yourself the truth that the DoW wanted to go over the red lines of anthropic and they said no, while openai said yes. This is as clear as day to everyone and you are just lying yourself to believe something else.

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

#517

Post by try-working »

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.

WeChat mini apps are called "H5" in China because they were enabled by the introduction of HTML 5. They are built on Tencent's WXML, which is an HTML derivative.

WeChat is a browser for mobile web applications, a small slice of the web universe gatekept by Tencent. WeChat was modelled after Gmail. So, it is very much like Chrome - you have your communications inbox, and your web apps, in the same app.

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

#518

Post by try-working »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #321
Rohansi wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I can pay my bills in Chrome too. You really fail to understand my point that WeChat is just a browser for web apps - H5 as they are called here in China.

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

#519

Post by lmm »

gunsle wrote: post #330
voganmother42 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Like Anthropic notably refused to.

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

#520

Post by aurareturn »

FatherOfCurses wrote: post #472
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.

> profits will come later Holy crap, is it the year 2000 again?

2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. This is how tech companies work, especially in a new industry.
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