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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

#61

Post by simonjgreen »

sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

Anthropic is definitely gaining ground over OpenAI in the business world. Cowork is the absolute hotness right now, and even prompted MSFT to drop their own variant yesterday

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

#62

Post by strongpigeon »

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 do wonder how much of Amazon's $50B share (per last press release) is in AWS credits rather than money in the bank.

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

#63

Post by thomasahle »

oulipo2 wrote: post #26

They are trying very hard to convince themselves that it's going to work, when we see all the models plateauing... it's clearly hitting the ceiling

I don't know anyway using these models everyday who think they are hitting a ceiling.

If anything there's a plateau between each model release.

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

#64

Post by strongpigeon »

simonjgreen wrote: post #61
sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

Anthropic is definitely gaining ground over OpenAI in the business world. Cowork is the absolute hotness right now, and even prompted MSFT to drop their own variant yesterday

Ask anybody you know that works in Big Tech. They're all pushing hard for Claude Code adoption.

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

#65

Post by BitsAndObjects »

chuckadams wrote: post #60
BitsAndObjects wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of modern medicine, by which I mean each discovery and invention in their own right, stand alongside electricity. Particularly vaccines. AI isn’t there yet. You could turn off AI tomorrow and there’d be a shock but people would quickly switch back. You could not do the same for electricity, medicine, combustion engines (or steam engines/turbines), computers, the internet, modern building materials, etc. You try…

I think the Internet is the more apt analogy. But even with electricity, you could have taken it away within the first couple decades of its popularity and society would have shrugged it off. Once they got used to that telegraph thing, not so much.

Yeah, I agree, but AI isn’t there yet. It’s too early to call it one way or the other. There’s plenty else that’s as important as electricity in my view, and maybe AI will join those ranks in 15 years or so when it’s gone through the hype loop and when the economy has recovered from the now-basically-inevitable AI- and war-fueled turmoil of the next decade.

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

#66

Post by rpdillon »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #38
oidar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd. Do you feel that any technology is comparable in it’s impact?

Most of modern medicine, by which I mean each discovery and invention in their own right, stand alongside electricity. Particularly vaccines. AI isn’t there yet. You could turn off AI tomorrow and there’d be a shock but people would quickly switch back. You could not do the same for electricity, medicine, combustion engines (or steam engines/turbines), computers, the internet, modern building materials, etc. You try…

That's primarily a function of the time for adoption, though, not the utility of the technology. In 20 years, people would not be able to so easily say that they could turn off AI with no impact.

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

#67

Post by ravenstine »

sidrag22 wrote: post #49

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself. I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general p…

Though I think these companies are wildly overvalued, I don't see LLMs as a service going away in the future. The value in OpenAI is that it provides extra compute, data access, etc. My money is on local AI becoming more of a thing, while services like OpenAI still exist for local AIs to consult with. If a local model can somehow know that it's out of it's depth on a question/prompt, it can ask an OpenAI model if it's available, but otherwise still work locally if OpenAI fails to respond or goes out of business. To me that makes a lot more sense than the future being either-or.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

ricardobeat wrote: post #18
strongpigeon wrote: post #17

This has to be just an extension of their previous raise, right? This was a month ago: https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

Doesn't look like it, that previous round was entirely Softbank + Nvidia + Amazon, while this one is VC + private investors. The valuation seems odd though, you'd expect $840B post-money from that earlier round?

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by cmiles8 »

This all smells fishy. They didn’t “raise” $122B. Raise means someone put funds in your bank account and said send us the next quarterly report to tell us how our investment is doing.

They have pieces from paper of folks saying they may put up funds or goods and services in that amount. But it’s important to remember that:

1. While they are “raising” commitments others are backing out of deals (see Disney, various data center things). Big deals announced to major fanfare are falling through.

2. They slashed capital expenditure for the future after previously boasting about all the commitments. This is turning into bonkers math of X + Y - X + Z + W - 1/2 of Y = ? On trying to keep track of what’s actually “raised / real” vs what was PR puffery that folks ran away from later.

3. Circular financing still seems to be going on. Big difference of here’s cash, have fun and various “commitments” and balance sheet games that seem to still be going on.

Net net this all still looks very scary and iffy at best.

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