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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

#81

Post by Jaskhy »

The title is incorrect. The $122B includes previous promises. They raised an additional $12B of promises:

"The round totaled $122 billion of committed capital, up from the $110 billion figure that the company announced in February. SoftBank co-led the round alongside other investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and D. E. Shaw Ventures, OpenAI said."

This IPO, if anyone underwrites it, is going to fleece retail so hard. Better make it a SPAC with the help of Chamath and Cantor & Fitzgerald.

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

#82

Post by zitterbewegung »

cmiles8 wrote: post #70

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 da…

Are we truly arguing semantics on HN which is a news aggregator for startups and everyone truly knows what a "raise" is and it is obviously not funds in your bank account? I don't disagree with the rest of your comment and the core thesis is valid that OpenAI is very much doing circular financing.

Edit: A raise comes with stipulations on what you can use the money for. I don't know if I was being too mean about responding to a parent but before you comment just google what a raise has..

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

#83

Post by Aurornis »

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.

Having large funding rounds contingent on meeting milestones is common. Always has been.

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

#84

Post by a1studmuffin »

operatingthetan wrote: post #75
simonjgreen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Codex and Gemini CLI seem 1-2 months behind Claude Code. They will catch up. This race will eventually be won by whoever can come up with the cheapest compute.

And that's a dangerous game because the cheaper compute gets, the more likely consumers are to self-host rather than pay a subscription.

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

#86

Post by MinimalAction »

I hate to read this line when academics and graduate students who work in basic and hard sciences have their funding cut. The grand funding that pays minimum wage to grad students is a burden for this society, yet for a company that took all the valuable data from sources that never got credit, raises billions of dollars. Open says the name, but closed it is by operation. Sorry for this rant, but the priorities of this world suck.

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

#87

Post by sanex »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #82
cmiles8 wrote: post #70

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 da…

Are we truly arguing semantics on HN which is a news aggregator for startups and everyone truly knows what a "raise" is and it is obviously not funds in your bank account? I don't disagree with the rest of your comment and the core thesis is valid that OpenAI is very much doing circular financing. Edit: A raise comes with stipulations on what you can use the money for. I don't know if I was being too mean about respo…

Other than funds in a bank account I do not know what it would mean.

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

#88

Post by maipen »

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 feel that too, every technology has its limits. I use AI daily. But I can’t see the “intelligence“. All I see is fine tuning and bigger datasets.

Yesterday I asked claude to fix the color issues of graph. It failed miserably. Opus 4.6 wasn’t able to figure out why the text was grey. It made something up, instead of realizing the problem was simple, oklch wrapped inside a hsl color. hsl(oklch(…)) I easily figured this out by just looking at the css and adding some logs to js.

This is not intelligence. This is a tool that’s smart. Not sentient. AGI won’t be achieved by scaling alone.

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

#89

Post by ds2df »

a1studmuffin wrote: post #84
operatingthetan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codex and Gemini CLI seem 1-2 months behind Claude Code. They will catch up. This race will eventually be won by whoever can come up with the cheapest compute.

And that's a dangerous game because the cheaper compute gets, the more likely consumers are to self-host rather than pay a subscription.

Apple could figure out a way to neatly package it into their ecosystem.

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

#90

Post by miki123211 »

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…

> how impossible is a world where open source base models are collectively trained similar to a proof of work style pool

Current multi-GPU training setups assume much higher bandwidth (and lower latency) between the GPUs than you can get with an internet connection. Even cross-datacenter training isn't really practical.

LLM training isn't embarrassingly parallel, not like crypto mining is for example. It's not like you can just add more nodes to the mix and magically get speedups. You can get a lot out of parallelism, certainly, but it's not as straightforward and requires work to fully utilize.

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