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OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation
https://archive.md/H9JNt https://archive.md/H9JNt
- tiniuclx 1y agoIt boggles the mind what OpenAI could possibly do with all this money.
- iamtheworstdev 1y ago[flagged]
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago[flagged]
- whynotminot 1y agoIf she was my sister, I wouldn’t bend to her extortion attempts either. She looney.
- moralestapia 1y agoI don't take sides for or against, because no one really knows what happened.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago[flagged]
- orionsbelt 1y agoMaybe before you judge someone you should know the facts. They have basically done that, per the below statement by the rest of the family. I have a mentally ill family member and they are enormously difficult and are their own worst enemy and refuse help; there’s a reason many end up homeless. “Our family loves Annie and is very concerned about her well-being. Caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult. We know many families facing similar struggles understand this well.Over the years, we've tried in many ways to support Annie and help her find stability, following professional advice on how to be supportive without enabling harmful behaviors. To give a sense of our efforts, we have given her monthly financial support, directly paid her bills, covered her rent, helped her find employment opportunities, attempted to get her medical help, and have offered to buy her a house through a trust (so that she would have a secure place to live, but not be able to sell it immediately). Via our late father's estate, Annie receives monthly financial support, which we expect to continue for the rest of her life. Despite this, Annie continues to demand more money from us. In this vein, Annie has made deeply hurtful and entirely untrue claims about our family, and especially Sam. We've chosen not to respond publicly, out of respect for her privacy and our own. However, she has now taken legal action against Sam, and we feel we have no choice but to address this. Over the years, she has accused members of our family of improperly withholding our father's 401k funds, hacking her wife, and "shadowbanning" her from various websites including ChatGPT, Twitter, and more. The worst allegation she has made is that she was sexually abused by Sam as a child (she has also claimed instances of sexual abuse from others). Her claims have evolved drastically over time. Newly for this lawsuit, they now include allegations of incidents where Sam was over 18. All of these claims are utterly untrue. This situation causes immense pain to our entire family. It is especially gut-wrenching when she refuses conventional treatment and lashes out at family members who are genuinely trying to help. We ask for understanding and compassion from everyone as we continue to support Annie in the best way we can. We sincerely hope she finds the stability and peace she's been searching for. -Connie, Sam, Max, and Jack”
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoWhere did I say what anyone else did or didn't do, or judge anybody?
- orionsbelt 1y agoApologies if I misread your post, but by calling Sam a psychopath in the same post, it seemed to imply that you would have offered her treatment that he did not.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoI didn't say he was or was not, you likely read it that way because of some bias you have.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoOh please. Sam offered her a house.
- jordanb 1y agoTurn electricity into heat.
- marshall2x 1y agoAnd plenty of warm water
- Ekaros 1y agoNot to forget buy really expensive sand...
- criley2 1y agoI mean, they can burn it all up in a fire in a few months. xAI loses $1 billion per month, so this round would be an 8 month runway for that company. OpenAI loses $2 for every $1 it brings in, but perhaps they're only losing $500M/mo, so maybe this $8b could last them more than a year...
- andsoitis 1y ago> xAI loses $1 billion per month Isn’t the vast majority of that capex?
- rasz 1y agoPaying Oracle monthly bills is not capex.
- andsoitis 1y agoIt was recently reported by Reuters: XAI is training Grok on 230,000 graphics processing units, including Nvidia's 30,000 GB200 AI chips, in a supercluster, with inference handled by the cloud providers, Musk said in a post on X on Tuesday. He added that another supercluster will soon launch with an initial batch of 550,000 GB200 and GB300 chips. I suppose one could argue this training isnt capex, but I was also under the impression that xAI was building sites for housing their AI.
- lanthissa 1y agohire like 8 people?
- pokstad 1y agoPut millions of people out of work
- rvz 1y agoThe true definition of AGI.
- rasz 1y agoPay current expenses for about two and a half months.
- ratg13 1y agoThey want to build several 5 GW data centers. (equivalent to the power consumption of a major city) $8.3B is not even close to enough in order to get to what they are thinking.
- bobsmooth 1y agoGive it to Nvidia.
- bix6 1y agoNice they can poach 3 engineers back from Meta!
- ozgrakkurt 1y agoOut of all blockchain/AI hype bs, best thing is engineers getting rich
- ttul 1y agoAnd, down the road, after the bust finishes, these rich engineers will seed the next thing. Assuming the world still needs engineers.
- camillomiller 1y agoYeah, all 7 of them
- jstummbillig 1y agoBecause?
- halfmatthalfcat 1y agoBecause.
- rvz 1y agoBecause.
- jstummbillig 1y agoI guess it's obvious why anyone should be delighted to learn or care at all that a random set of engineers are now getting a relatively bigger share of all the money in the world.
- shepherdjerred 1y agoBecause this is a site for engineers Commenters are going to prefer things that benefit engineers even if it’s not themselves
- webdevver 1y agodamnit why didn't they make it a trillion!? that would really send a message.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoTo be honest Chatgpt really really spiked nvidia's stocks because (AI duh), so yes they did make it a trillion except its in some other company lol.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ahmedhawas123 1y agoSo OpenAI is running at a $13B ARR, meaning this is a ~23X valuation. I don't have a good read on margin. But this would imply massive growth assumptions which I struggle a bit to understand where they come from. (1) New customers new to AI or migrations from Claude/Perplexity/Google: The overwhelming majority of people already know about the offerings, leaving most new people to come from residual people who identify Plus/Pro as a worthy service (can't imagine this will be huge). OpenAI can be better than their peers for certain use cases but not sure it will drive massive growth (2) API: If anything, my bet here is that price squeezing will continue to happen until most API services are dirt cheap / commoditized (3) New consulting services: What's the differentiation here? Palantir and many consulting companies have been doing this for years and have the industry connections, etc Not sure what I'm missing here, I like to not subscribe to the bubble thought but having a hard time merging the reality of running a business to the AGI-implied valuations
- empath75 1y agoThink about how much money openai could make _just_ by getting referrals for agentic work flows (ie: help me plan my vacation). The thing that people are missing is that openai is a platform like google's, and there are a million different businesses they can expand into.
- ahmedhawas123 1y agoSure, but I think the question is who will win the domain specific use cases (delivery, not API). Delivery of the agentic workflows is up for anyone to win (players like Perplexity, Lovable, etc) and OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic is in a way only a vendor to that by providing what will become a commoditized function calling API/MCP provider.
- empath75 1y agoOpen AI has 10 times the active users of any of it's competitors, including google.
- ttul 1y agoIMHO, investors are happy to pay 23x ARR because Nvidia trades at 29x EV/sales and arguably OpenAI should support a higher multiple given it is a smaller entity with more headroom for growth.
- layer8 1y agoThat would imply that OpenAI has less competition to fear than Nvidia, which I’m doubtful is the case.
- signatoremo 1y agoThat doesn’t imply anything. Each investor has their own take on risk. They’d invest if they think the risks are worth it.
- GiorgioG 1y agoSo how much more runway does this give OpenAPI? A year?
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoDidn't OpenAI's last raise in March value them at $300B [1]? [1] https://www.channelinsider.com/news-and-trends/us/open-ai-funding-round-march-2025/#:~:text=OpenAI%20Secures%20Record%20%2440B,rss https://www.channelinsider.com/news-and-trends/us/open-ai-fu... Crunchbase appears to list it as $157B [2], but I seem to find the other terms & valuations more commonly. [2] https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-rounds-october-2024-ai-energy-biotech/ https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-rounds-october-2...
- ozzy6009 1y agoLooks like it is talking about the same thing: > OpenAI has raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation, months ahead of schedule, as part of its plan to secure $40 billion in funding this year, DealBook has learned. Back in March, OpenAI announced its ambitious funding plans, with SoftBank committing to provide $30 billion by year-end.
- softwaredoug 1y agoIMO they are overvalued considering the competition from Google and Anthropic. They're not doing much interesting, unless they release GPT-5 and its a gamechanger.
- MangoCoffee 1y agoSweet VC money fueling the AI hype. Funny enough, my TikTok feed recently started showing videos about how corporate America is going to replace workers with AI. I even came across an interview with Marc Benioff where he said Salesforce will deploy AI to help with engineering.
- throwawaylaptop 1y agoWho wouldnt deploy AI to help with engineering? The question is, will it help so much that you need fewer engineers, or will you simply be ecstatic that your engineers are now a little or a lot more productive. If you have x engineers, and your competitor has the same x number of engineers.. and you both start using AI, are you going to layoff half your engineers when your competitor doesn't? Unless your cash strapped and also don't have any plans for new development, I suppose yes. But otherwise, it's just another thing you need.
- _fat_santa 1y agoGiven their current product offerings, I really don't see a way they could ever justify a $300B valuation unless they get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan. I'm calling it now: investors are gonna get burned hard on this one. Cause right now all they have is "well we are working on superintelligence" and to that I say "great, then what?". Even if they do make that breakthrough I don't see how that will equate to that kind of valuation, especially considering that Anthropic and Google are both hot on their heels.
- mgfist 1y ago> OpenAI’s business continues to surge. DealBook hears that the company’s annual recurring revenue has soared to $13 billion, up from $10 billion in June — and is projected to surpass $20 billion by the end of the year. This is why. Of course $300B still implies a lot of growth, but when you're growing 100% in 6 months at $10B in ARR, you can demand a lot.
- indigodaddy 1y agoAnd what's the profit on the 13B?
- mgfist 1y agoIrrelevant at this stage.
- KerrAvon 1y agothe problem with the post-dotcom market in a nutshell. everything’s a bubble. bubbles have more durability now. until they don’t.
- mgfist 1y agoSure, but this mentality always would result in missing out on the trillion dollar companies that followed these types of growth curves. Surely you must understand that prioritizing growth over profit makes economic sense in the long run for a company like OpenAI.
- boringg 1y agoWhy is this article from nytimes - they aren't a great source for VC deal info.
- dgb23 1y agoFrom online discourse and talking to people in different sectors that are impacted by "AI", I feel like there is great uncertainty, incredible hype and doomerism at the same time. My intuition is that we're in a huge tech bubble that will correct at some point. I don't know when that is or how severe it will be. But why should this tech hype cycle be qualitatively different from any of the others?
- kevinventullo 1y agoI mean which hype cycle? We talk about the dotcom bubble, in which there were of course growing pains in figuring out what makes a viable internet-based business, but at the end of the day that era did produce multiple trillion-dollar companies. Then you have the crypto bubble which really seems to be shaping up to be a nothing burger. As for today, I think LLM’s are already pretty clearly useful, and they seem to be getting more capable with each passing year. In principle, these models are just the core foundations, while a wide variety of applications are in the process of being fleshed out. I think the jury is still out on how disruptive and effective these applications will be, both from a business/PMF perspective, but also in terms of the raw capabilities. So take something like Harvey AI. They just raised a round at a $5B valuation, despite having an annualized revenue of just $75M as of April. So is that overinflated? Well, the total Legal Services market has a valuation of about $1T, and given how much legal work is incredibly laborious reading, analyzing, and writing text, (things which LLM’s are already pretty good at), it doesn’t seem ridiculous on the face of it that a Legal-focused LLM product couldn’t add 0.5% worth of efficiencies/value.
- v5v3 1y agoWhat does OpenAI have over XAI to make such a difference in valuation? XAi includes x/twitter and lots of hardware and is valued at $113 billion https://www.eweek.com/news/elon-musk-xai-valuation-debt-package/ https://www.eweek.com/news/elon-musk-xai-valuation-debt-pack...
- sollewitt 1y agoI think _not_ having Elon Musk is worth a couple of hundred billion in 2025, the guy has become a random liability generator.
- jsnell 1y agoXAI does not include Twitter, as far as I know? Aren't they separate entities? But Twitter can't be worth more than a couple of tens of billions at the most. Things OpenAI has that XAI doesn't: Hundreds of millions, if not already a billion, active users. A household brand-name. >$10B in revenue. In comparison XAI's revenue appears to be in the hundreds of millions/year and their brand is currently in the gutter after the recent spate of scandals. Their main differentiating factor is using their AI to power an anime waifu[0] companion app. [0] I don't think it's judgmental to use this term when they were doing so in their own job ad titles
- v5v3 1y agoX was sold to xAI earlier this year. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqjq11202ro https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqjq11202ro
- jajko 1y agoIt doesnt have an owner who is open nazi sympathiser and doesnt wage frequent petty verbal wars with most powerful person on the planet, at least on the paper? trump could make musk go away in a blink, literally abd figuratively. He wont do it, probably, we will see.
- timmg 1y agoDoes xAI have a similar amount of revenue/customers? (I've personally never heard anyone talk about using it -- except on Twitter.)
- christianqchung 1y agoI thought they were going for $340B?[0] [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/30/openai-in-talks-to-raise-up-to-40-billion-at-340-billion-valuation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/30/openai-in-talks-to-raise-up-...
- alexnewman 1y agoAren’t they a non profit. Do I get stock for my donation?
- hodder 1y agoI'd give my left nut to buy into OpenAI at this valuation. 300B is peanuts compared to where it would trade publicly, FCF and net income be damned. The growth and the optionality are there when you bring a tool this valuable to the world. This is destined to trade over 2T rapidly imo. PLTR (granted imo a bubble) trades above that, and PLTR is basically a glorified IBM/Accenture business model with mediocre growth.
- adammarples 1y agoIf you owned 100% of OpenAI, and you weren't allowed to sell it, how would you go about using it to generate $2Tn?
- rich_sasha 1y agoHow much do investors make on average on VC? I mean, OpenAI is hardly a startup. But VC money can't be a one way street forever. So either: - VC invests on the whole sensibly and makes a return that justifies 10-15 year lock-in - VC has somehow changed and is now unsustainable, it is a one way cash flow and it will blow up like MBS did - VC sustainably delivers mediocre returns and gets some money in, some money out, but nothing special Im not sure which it might be.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoI would bet on #3
- ls612 1y ago#4: VC takes more risk (in the form of portfolio volatility on longer time horizons; look at the post dot com bust returns) and since capital markets in the US are reasonably efficient they get more expected returns for that risk.
- guywithahat 1y agoI mean it could be the investor knows the company wants to IPO and expects to make quick cash before they go public. Given the size of the company, it could be a short term play where they expect them to IPO at 500B in the next year or two
- solatic 1y ago> make on average This completely misses the boat on venture capital, which is almost by definition the riskiest of all risky bets. Any smart LP throwing $X into a fund has a portfolio valued, at the very least, at 100 if not 1000 times X. It is simply the way to expose the high-risk portion of the portfolio to that level of risk at the size of the investment needed. Being high-risk, probably it will return nothing. But it might not.
- rich_sasha 1y agoIt is the average that matters in the end. How much new money flows into VC per year? Some number of $1e9 - hundreds perhaps? What happens to it? If its all a folly and the money is burnt, it cannot last. But otherwise, these VCs investing at what looks like crazy valuations can't all be idiots.
- frognumber 1y agoPersonally, my estimate of a rational valuation would be: $1-2T with no legal risk. $300B assuming a rational and uncorrupt government, which should, at some point, kick them back to non-profit status, and convict people for fraud Of course, too-big-to-fail means this won't happen.
- nabla9 1y agoOpenAI hits $12 billion in annualized revenue, The Information reports https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annualized-revenue-information-reports-2025-07-31/ https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annu...
- rwmj 1y agoDon't worry, they might be making a loss on each transaction but they'll make it up in volume..
- Ekaros 1y agoThey have invested how much money and still not producing enough volume?
- dmix 1y agoSo about the same revenue as SpaceX.
- hu3 1y agoSpaceX is unique. OpenAI is one of many.
- cactusplant7374 1y agoThe many being companies that no one has heard of and only have a following here.
- ac29 1y agoSpaceX has a price advantage over their competitors, not a capability advantage. Putting things in orbit has been possible for ~70 years
- vasco 1y agoFrequency of launches is a capability.
- amradio1989 1y agoPretty insane valuation. It may pay off, it may not. Google search was vastly superior to its competitors. I don't think ChatGPT has that kind of edge. This is a monopoly kind of valuation where no monopoly exists. Its like paying Microsoft billions for Internet explorer. Personally I believe the future of AI models is open-source. The application of these models will be the real revenue driver.
- cactusplant7374 1y agoHow would an average person even tell if ChatGPT was better than its competitors? Most people aren't running enough prompts every month to even care. Everyone knows ChatGPT and no one knows its competitors. It's going to stay like that.
- derwiki 1y agoI reach for ChatGPT, but if I’m on a Google property and they shove Gemini in my face, I use Gemini. Memories are the biggest pull for me to keep coming back to ChatGPT, but I can’t imagine that’s a big moat.
- jm20 1y agoIt's so funny. Every single time a company raises a ton of money at a large valuation, the comments are always filled with "how do they justify this valuation" or "they aren't work X...because Y and Z do the same thing". VC math is pretty simple - at the end of the day, there's a pretty large likelihood that at least 1 AI company is going to reach a trillion dollar valuation. VCs want to find that company. OpenAI, while definitely not the only player, is the most "mainstream". Your average teacher or mechanic uses "chatgpt" and "AI" interchangeably. There's a ton of value in becoming a vowel, even if other technically superior competitors exist. Furthermore, the math changes at this level. No investor here is investing at a $300B valuation expecting a 10x. They're probably expecting a 3x or even a 2x. If they put in 300MM, they still end up with 600-900MM. This isn't math on revenue, it's a bet. And if you think in terms of risk-adjusted bets, hoping the most mainstream AI company today might at least double your money in the next ten years in a red-hot AI market is not as wild as it seems.
- vickychijwani 1y agoDoubling your money in 10 years is < 7.2% per year compounded. With the risks involved here, I wouldn’t take that bet. There are safer assets that would return that much.
- moralestapia 1y agoWhich ones, so I can acquire them.
- vickychijwani 1y agoJust holding Nasdaq 100 ETFs is enough? People get impressed by "doubled my money" but forget that the most important question is - how much time did it take? Even a super safe asset with 3% returns will double your money... in 24 years.
- moralestapia 1y ago7%+ per year?
- joshka 1y agoI'm curious about how something like this affects compensation? OpenAI's compensation model is generally to use profit share instead of equity share. PPUs (Profit Participation Units) rather than RSUs (Restricted Stock Units).
- joshka 1y agoI found the answer. Comp equity offers are based on the previous valuation at the last tender event. So now would still be a really good time to join OpenAI. I'm guessing this raise is likely a leading indicator of what that will trend towards in future.
- reducesuffering 1y agoSo many comments talking about revenue, investors, profit, etc. Remember when this company was a non-profit?! Our legal system is awful for letting this slide. The previous board was right.
- pmdr 1y agoIt's still pretty much nil-profit.
- moomin 1y agoRoutine reminder that if newspapers should quote the valuation implied by the debt, not the equity, in mixed deals.
- nextworddev 1y agoIt should be on track to becoming a $1trn company
- MagicMoonlight 1y agoThey haven’t released a new model in ages and their research seems dead in the water. People are going to get burned on all these meme stocks.
- jonplackett 1y agoHow weird would it be though if OpenAI actually did go under. So many things are now built on top of this thing. Is it only really economically viable because it’s being subsidised by generous venture caps?
- pointlessone 1y agoDidn’t they promise GPT-5 this month? The one that got gold on IMO?
- klysm 1y ago300 billion is completely absurd
- cedws 1y agoI think NVIDIA's is absurder. Higher than Apple, Microsoft, Google. They're the number one for AI chips, but they're not the only company that can make them.
- itsafarqueue 1y agoDoesn’t this all go to shit if they can’t flip into a for profit by December? Tons of cash commitments are tied to that far-from-finalised outcome.
- lippihom 1y agoAds in answers coming with OpenAI becoming the gateway to all online shopping.