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OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation
https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
https://x.com/sama/status/2027386252555919386 https://x.com/sama/status/2027386252555919386
https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2027386252555919386 https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2027386252555919386
- zippyman55 7mo agoWow! This is circular financing. Sharknado, Altnado….
- gigatexal 7mo ago[flagged]
- lnsru 7mo agoIt’s not craze. It’s technology shift. Bitcoin and 3D printing were craze. It’s like a move from analog photography to digital. I am telling you this as a very conservative person. Even for me it’s helpful.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago> 3D printing were craze That's certainly a take, industry loves it. Sure, all that "everybody will print widgets at home instead of going to the store" stuff was never going to happen, but 3d printing is nonetheless here to stay.
- consp 7mo agoI do not long back to the days of reused boxes and ducktape as homes for my electronics. It's here to stay.
- wooger 7mo agoIt's a manufacturing technique that is helpful for prototyping and makes sense some types of small scale manufacturing. But it's not magical, and not much different to injection moulding or something in concept. Almost everything created with home level 3d printers is plastic junk you can buy for a few dollars on aliexpress (without weird rough edges).
- qsera 7mo agoSo how much are you willing to pay for it?
- whynotminot 7mo agoPersonally at this point my combined AI spend is the most expensive recurring monthly subscription I have, and that’s even with my company also paying for the AI tools I use at work. If it weren’t subsidized I would pay more. Wouldn’t be happy about it but I would do it. At this stage in the game I don’t really understand where this skepticism of the value these tools provides comes from.
- qsera 7mo agoActually it is not about this stage. It is about the sustainability of this when training data runs out and there is less and less human generated content. An echo cannot go on forever!
- whynotminot 7mo ago> Actually it is not about this stage. It is about the sustainability of this when training data runs out This is an argument from 2024. Somehow, the models have continued to improve. If they stopped improving today they are good enough as they already are to generate profound change. The wave front is already visible, we’re just on the shore waiting for the impact.
- qsera 7mo agoWhen training data runs out, they usefulness will diminish quickly. They will still be useful for searching documents etc, but I guess they are not good at that even now.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo agoWhen training data runs out, their usefulness will stop growing quickly. Why should their usefulness diminish?
- boelboel 7mo ago3D printing has a CAGR of 18-25%, not exactly 'were craze'
- afavour 7mo agoIt can be both a craze and a technology shift. AI isn't going away, it will transform some industries. But right now it's overhyped, overfunded and due a trip back to reality.
- rob74 7mo ago3D printing is helpful too. The infrastructure created during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s was also helpful. The UK is still profiting from the railway infrastructure created during the railway craze of the 1840s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania). The question is just how much of the valuation of AI companies is because they are useful and how much is speculation...
- nalekberov 7mo ago> Bitcoin and 3D printing were craze. What bitcoin gave us essentially? Huge pump and dump schemes coordinated by big hands? Crypto investments which made 95% of investors poorer? What's left? Maybe 0.01% of it was beneficial.
- lstodd 7mo agoFreedom from overregulated and antiquated retail banking especially wrt cross-border transfers. I guess it isn't that noticeable from inside US, but the rest of the world is grateful.
- baal80spam 7mo ago> the rest of the world is grateful. Maybe speak for yourself? As part of the rest of the world, I am not grateful.
- lstodd 7mo agoAnd I do. Speak, that is.
- rvz 7mo ago> It’s not craze. It’s technology shift. It is a bubble with extreme levels of debt + funding from too many promises from companies that are in these sort of rounds. People being consumed by the hype will also be completely consumed by the crash. Comments like this is exactly how a 2000 and a 2008 style crash will happen.
- skeeter2020 7mo agoIt most definitely COULD be a craze from the perspective of scope of investment, societal impact and timing. No one surfing the crest of this wave could be described as "conservative".
- baggachipz 7mo ago"This time it's different!"
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dang 7mo ago"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gigatexal 7mo agoIt’s hard to not be jaded and suffer existential dread with what’s going on domestically and internationally dang. I’ll try to put on a happy face and think of cogent arguments to make. My apologies.
- dang 7mo agoI agree that it's hard. No need to put on a happy face; there's plenty of room to stay within the site guidelines without forcing yourself all the way to false feeling.
- illnewsthat 7mo agoThis should probably change to https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ which has more details. > Today we’re announcing $110B in new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation. This includes $30B from SoftBank, $30B from NVIDIA, and $50B from Amazon.
- tosh 7mo agoThe tweet storm has a bit more substance e.g. it talks about running NVIDIA's systems (?) on AWS > NVIDIA has long been one of our most important partners, and their chips are the foundation of AI computing. We are grateful for their continued trust in us, and excited to run their systems in AWS. Their upcoming generations should be great.
- coredog64 7mo agoProbably something like NVLink Fusion. AWS has been doing deals with suppliers for which the smallest unit of deployable compute is a 44U rack (e.g. Oracle), so this is more of the same. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink-fusion/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink-fusion/
- dang 7mo agoThanks, I've added that link to the toptext as part of merging a bunch of these threads. We try to avoid having corporate press releases as the top-level link, though of course there are exceptions sometimes.
- tosh 7mo ago> We continue to have a great relationship with Microsoft. Our stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure, and we will build out much more capacity with them. This sounds a bit like going forward (some) OpenAI APIs will also run on platforms other than Azure (AWS)? Anyone knows more?
- rob74 7mo agoI guess Amazon would have a hard time justifying their investment if OpenAI remained Azure-exclusive... https://openai.com/index/amazon-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/amazon-partnership/
- sidewndr46 7mo agoUnless I'm mistaken wasn't someone at Microsoft suggesting they would just develop their own models soon?
- zmmmmm 7mo agoCurious what is meant by "stateless". OpenAI desperately needs to be available outside Azure. We are exclusively using Anthropic atm because it is what is available in AWS Bedrock and it works. These things are solidifying fast.
- newyankee 7mo agoWhat would really help is knowing the details of such funding. The hierarchy of who gets paid first in event of going under is very illuminating and while I am not a banker I always wonder if there are caveats too complicated even for the large investors to understand
- hedora 7mo agoThis time, does the $100B actually exist? https://www.inc.com/leila-sheridan/nvidia-is-wavering-on-its-100b-openai-deal-and-the-timing-couldnt-be-worse-for-sam-altman/91295915 https://www.inc.com/leila-sheridan/nvidia-is-wavering-on-its... What's the statue of limitations for securities fraud? The current administration won't last forever.
- tartoran 7mo agoCircular economy money
- hedora 7mo agoNormally, there's at least a locked suitcase full of newspapers racking up frequent flier miles...
- rand846633 7mo ago1,000 metric tons do not fit in a airplane…
- reactordev 7mo agoFits evenly on a blockchain…
- tempodox 7mo ago1,000 metric tons of hot air is a lot of volume.
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoDefinitely with regard to Nvidia.
- bflesch 7mo agoIf you make a billion but only pay $2M for a pardon it might be worth it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/rudy-giuliani-selling-pardons-trump-b2340470.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
- jryio 7mo agoWithout circular investments and valuations what would Open AI be worth? 100B? 300B? Entirely on revenue alone it seems like 20B. Current valuation appears to be two orders of magnitude off.
- thefounder 7mo agoLet the retailers decide this year at IPO! The heavy bags must be carried by someone
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo agoIs this really the con? Be part of the in-group and buy pre-IPO shares to dump them on joe-six-pack shortly afterwards?
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoAlways has been? (Well, with pyramid schemes anyway.)
- thefounder 7mo agoAt least they don’t SPAC their way into the public market but the answer to your question is yes!
- marcosdumay 7mo agoI guess making the investment conditional on the company doing an IPO (or something that will never happen) should remove any doubts. But I'm not sure there is enough money on the world (literally) for them to get an IPO high enough. If they sell too little of the company, they'll be still holding the bag when it fails.
- vonneumannstan 7mo ago>Without circular investments and valuations what would Open AI be worth? 100B? 300B? Entirely on revenue alone it seems like 20B. Current valuation appears to be two orders of magnitude off. They just passed $20B in revenue, you can't really expect a company with this much hype and traction to have a 1x multiple.. that's not to say a 35x multiple makes sense either.
- mikkupikku 7mo agoSoftBank? The music must be stopping soon, hold onto your butts.
- whynotminot 7mo agoWhat? SoftBank has been investing in them repeatedly for years now.
- clouedoc 7mo agoWhat's the meme with SoftBank? Just that they're super bad at investments?
- reducesuffering 7mo agoYa. The WeWork debacle and investing $300 million into Wag, an imploded Uber for dog walking, surely wasn't helping.
- tgv 7mo agoThe idea being that you could at a random time call upon some random person to walk your dog? Someone wasted $300M on that? Must have been in a very sheltered environment.
- vimda 7mo agoKind of leaving out a lot of detail there: - Amazon's $50B is only $15B, with the rest being "after certain conditions are met", whatever that means (probably an IPO, which isn't happening) - The $30B each from softbank and NVIDIA is paid in installments So this is more a $35B fundraise, with a _promise_ of more, maybe, if conditions are met. Not _bad_, but yet more gaslighting from Mr Altman. Anyone reporting this as a closed fundraising deal is being disingenuous at best.
- moralestapia 7mo agoNot to nitpick but to expand, many funding deals (pretty much all above 100M) are structured like that. You'll never get a billion dollar check from anyone. I've even seen startups raise like 500k pre-seed with tranches in it, lmao!
- skeeter2020 7mo agonit: I think you mean tranches
- moralestapia 7mo agoWhoops, typo. Thanks!
- nszceta 7mo ago*tranche
- Aurornis 7mo ago> - Amazon's $50B is only $15B, with the rest being "after certain conditions are met", whatever that means (probably an IPO, which isn't happening) Startup funding is often given in increments depending on milestones being met. Most startups just don’t announce that it’s conditional. For large funding rounds, nobody gets a check for the full amount at once. The funding would not be conditional on an IPO because that wouldn’t make any sense. The IPO is the liquidity event for the investors and there’s no reason for a startup to take private investment money that only enters the company after IPO.
- bssac045 7mo agoWhat are they going to do with it?
- sidewndr46 7mo agoI this $110 Billion more or just $110 billion historically?
- rvnx 7mo agoMore
- user3939382 7mo ago$30B from Nvidia… so the investments are locked in circular dependency. Great for the economy.
- idiotsecant 7mo agoThis implies any actual investment took place, which would be an innovative break from the typical scenario with AI firms.
- baggachipz 7mo agoOh the "investment" is definitely taking place on paper. Whether any money actually changes hands... doubtful.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Yizahi 7mo agoNvidia will get all that money back via GPU purchases, Amazon via cloud rental and SoftBank is being typical SoftBank - a rich but not particularly bright kid in a class :) .
- AnimalMuppet 7mo ago"I give you $30 billion if you use it to buy $30 billion of stuff from me" doesn't sound like a very good investment. Is Nvidia expecting more back than it puts in? Enough more to make the deal profitable? Or is it just to keep Nvidia from crashing?
- Yizahi 7mo agoWell, I won't pretend I know the answer :) . But I assume that a) they are partially betting on making a normal return on investment (i.e. OAI not crashing), b) they profit from running a huge expense/revenue cycle (a company making say a million of profit and having a billion revenue is favored better than the same but with only ten million revenue), and c) even if all goes wrong, it is still better to get back most of the investment even if not everything and zero profit, compared to a possibility of just losing it all like SoftBank or other investors.
- vonneumannstan 7mo ago$30B in sales is worth more than $30B in stock appreciation...
- rich_sasha 7mo agoIn the end it's exchanging GPUs for OpenAI shares. It's not a non-trade, and in the current market Nvidia could really sell the stuff for cash. The marginal cost is very much sharply positive.
- max51 7mo ago"I give you 30B$ worth of hardware that costs me <10B$ to make in exchange for 30B$ worth of shares in your company" would be a more accurate description.
- vb-8448 7mo agoBurn baby, burn! BTW, real money or credits?
- IhateAI_2 7mo ago[dead]
- aurareturn 7mo agoHN told me OpenAI was on the verge of collapse.
- sethops1 7mo agoHow much revenue have they generated? How about profit? If investors keep throwing obscene money at OpenAI, sure, they can stay afloat forever. Can't argue with that. But if we're talking about a sustainable business, I still don't see it.
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoIf nobody invested in OpenAI how long could they keep the lights on? They're not profitable yet, and a lot of the wealth that Sam Altman seems to be making revolves around strange circular deals. By comparison, Anthropic is projected to break even in 2028. Google's Gemini is already profitable.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 7mo ago[flagged]
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoThe title and escrow industry is using Gemini (via Qualia Clear) enough so that Qualia accounts for 100 billions of token usage in about 3 months. Just because you don't see who is using it, and how, doesn't mean that when the dust settles, the people actually using AI for real purposes wont keep using AI. I'm not sure which AI models big pharma is using, but there's already at least one new pharmaceutical drug in the secondary testing phase, showing strong results. There will definitely be room for AI. OpenAI is just not really showing that they care about a particular business model. Probably a strong indicator that Sam Altman is probably the worst person to lead that company. Anthropic will be profitable before OpenAI ever will be. Gemini is in the green in terms of spending / income ratio FYI. I'm not talking about stocks.
- richwater 7mo ago
- mikert89 7mo agoI love how people think the company that basically invented ai is going out of business. Clearly OpenAI is a massive success and will continue to be
- derwiki 7mo agoThat’s what my Uber told me last night, not sure how he was able to get his hands on some stock!
- bigfishrunning 7mo ago"Basically invented AI" by running on principles that Minsky wrote about in the 80s, and improvements Google developed in the early 10s, on bigger and bigger computers. But "Basically invented".
- maplethorpe 7mo ago> The Information had previously reported that $35 billion of Amazon’s investment could be contingent on the company either achieving AGI or making its IPO by the end of the year. OpenAI’s announcement confirms the funding split, but says only that the additional $35 billion will arrive “in the coming months when certain conditions are met.” Incredible.
- konschubert 7mo agoSo basically, Amazon is buying into the IPO at an early price. Maybe this is the time to divest from MSCI world. I don’t want to be the bag holder in the world’s largest pump and dump. It can both be true at the same time: That AI is going to disrupt our world and that Open AI does not have a business model that supports its valuation.
- WarmWash 7mo agoTesla is a car company with relatively small, and shrinking, sales, that is worth $1.5T on the promise of [Elons_Promise_of_the_Month]
- sixQuarks 7mo agoYou forgot to mention they solved vision based autonomous driving, but I guess that doesn’t matter if Elon = bad
- zozbot234 7mo agoSAE level 2 driver assistance is explicitly not autonomous driving.
- iancmceachern 7mo agoHuh? They did not "solve" vision based driving.
- eviks 7mo ago
- ai_fry_ur_brain 7mo ago[flagged]
- yakkomajuri 7mo agoI guess no GPT on Bedrock still it seems
- throw03172019 7mo agoThey announced more OpenAI models coming to bedrock.
- pier25 7mo ago> Amazon will start with an initial $15 billion investment, followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met. Those conditions are an IPO or reaching AGI [1]. Nvidia and SofBank will pay in installments. Also very interesting that Microsoft decided to not invest in this round. A PR statement was made though [2]. [1] https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/02/26/amazon-to-invest-50-billion-in-openai-depending-on-ipo-475942/ https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/02/26/amazon-to-invest... [2] https://openai.com/index/continuing-microsoft-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/continuing-microsoft-partnership/
- konschubert 7mo agoSo they’re getting in on the IPO. Are they going to get stock for it or is it a PIPE? Personally, I don’t think I want to get in on this at retail prices. It can both be true at the same time that AI going to disrupt our world and that being an AI lab is a terrible business.
- rvnx 7mo agoBut will you have a choice once they enter the indexes ? People are automatically going to invest into that (circular) pyramid scheme.
- konschubert 7mo agoYea, I’m considering divesting from msci world into single stocks
- mattfrommars 7mo agolike the other comment, openai can force itself onto the massive index like VOO/FXAIX etc to make retail folks to provide liquidity exit for openai investors.
- konschubert 7mo agoThere is always the option to sell msci world and buy single stocks.
- ViewTrick1002 7mo agoTaking the circular deals up another magnitude?
- thinkingtoilet 7mo agoOnly $730B? Why stop there? As long as we're making stuff up, let's go big. What about $10T?
- sunaookami 7mo agoRookie numbers, I say $100T. Go big or go home.
- frizlab 7mo agohttps://paintraincomic.com/comic/first-date/ https://paintraincomic.com/comic/first-date/
- muzani 7mo agoThey have to save the big T for IPO. On a tangent, I remember companies like Slack triggering the unicorn craze. They said that it was just better to aim for a billion than some number like 900M or 1.2B, because psychologically, it meant more to employees, investors, and customers. OpenAI is in that place where nobody really cares for these mind games. It's not very reliable. But it is useful enough to pay for. It's cheap enough to be an impulse purchase where some guy decides to just subscribe to ChatGPT because they're working on an important slide or sketching a logo.
- outside1234 7mo agoRemember when it was a huge milestone when gigantic companies like Apple and Microsoft were striving to be the first $1T company backed with decades of building actual businesses with actual profit? Good times.
- etyhhgfff 7mo agoYou have to make it look semi-realistic
- snitch182 7mo ago730 Billion certainly is a bubble that will pop sooner or later.
- wongarsu 7mo ago$110B at $840B post-money valuation for OpenAI vs $30B at $380B post-money for Anthropic announced two weeks ago This does not increase my confidence in OpenAI's future
- rustyhancock 7mo agoWell Anthropic has said (a fairly weak but clear) no to DoW, I wonder who will say yes?
- lm28469 7mo agohttps://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pentagon https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen... > Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines in Pentagon fight 90% chance it's all PR but who knows
- qoez 7mo agoNever believe anything sam says
- amarcheschi 7mo agoNever believe anything <insert tech ceo here> says
- _fat_santa 7mo agoIMO this looks largely like another circular investment. Amazon's investment is tied to OpenAI using AWS for their Frontier product and I assume Nvidia's conditions are that OpenAI continue buying hardware from them. Then there's SoftBank though given that those are the same guys that invested heavily in WeWork, I assume this is just very brash bullishness on their part. From my perspective, I hope that OpenAI survives and can pull of their IPO but I just have that nagging feeling in my gut that their IPO will be rejected in much the same way that the WeWork IPO was rejected. On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves. When their IPO hits later this year I hope that it's the former case and there's actually some good underlying fundamentals to invest in. But based on everything I've read, my gut is telling me they will eventually implode under the weight of their business model and spending commitments.
- system2 7mo agoI am expecting OpenAI stock to be the most volatile in history. The first 3-6 months will be fun.
- leonflexo 7mo agoHow far the volatility ripples out will give us a real look into just how self-reinforced the financials truly are.
- ChadNauseam 7mo ago> On the one hand you can look at these companies investing and take it as a signal that there is something there (in OpenAI) that's worth investing in. On the other hand all these companies that are investing are basically getting that investment back through spending commitments and such and are just using OpenAI as a proxy for what is essentially buying more revenue for themselves. I don't understand how this is some kind of cheat code. Let's say I give you $100 on the condition that you buy $100 worth of product from me. And let's say that product cost me $80 to produce. Isn't that basically the same as me giving you $80? I don't see at all how that's me "basically getting that investment back".
- pdyc 7mo agoand they say its not a bubble! we saw it with oracle deal, big announcement and than nothing, same with nvidia and now same thing is going again i hpe this is cash infusion and not some credit deal.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- randusername 7mo agoThere's this saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a big problem, but if you owe the bank 100 million dollars, the bank has a big problem. Is the same thing true for corporations? At some point the numbers are so wild the entire economy must help you succeed? I don't mean "too big to fail" exactly, more like "so big eventual success is guaranteed at all costs"
- advael 7mo agoThose are the same thing. The whole point of saying "too big to fail" is to evoke the moment in the housing crash where governments largely threw most of their citizens under the bus by bailing out banks rather than homeowners for the banks' wildly irresponsible decisions. "Too big to fail" means the government steps in and bails you out, and that phrase became popular because for many it was the final nail in the coffin for their trust in government
- Dumblydorr 7mo agoWould the current administration bail out OpenAI?
- hn_acc1 7mo agoThey would give OpenAI anything they want if they proclaim the current guy the bestest and biggliest president of all time, ever. (edit: I meant, if chatgpt were to consistently claim that the current guy is the greatest president ever)
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo agoI wonder if there is "too big for IPO". Saudi Aramco in 2019 sold shares worth $25.6 billion in IPO. Even offering just 5% of OpenAI to public would shatter that record. Well, unless public isn't actually interested in investing such huge amounts.
- paxys 7mo agoAnd if you owe the bank a hundred billon dollars the entire economy has a big problem.
- ChicagoDave 7mo agoIt’s Tesla only big tech are the suckers.
- 9cb14c1ec0 7mo agoThere is not a single OpenAI model in the top 10 on openrouter's ranking page. The market is saying something about the comparative value of OpenAI. Edit: yes, it is true that many people do integrate directly with OpenAI. That doesn't negate the fact that Openrouter users are largely not using OpenAI.
- spott 7mo agoThis could just be because everyone is using direct OpenAI api keys when using OpenAI.
- cj 7mo ago> The market is saying something about the comparative value of OpenAI. Is it? At what point are the models going to all be "good enough", with the differentiating factor being everything else, other than model ranking? That day will come. Not everyone needs a Ferrari. Edit: I misread the parent, I think they're saying the same thing.
- alephnerd 7mo ago> At what point are the models going to all be "good enough", with the differentiating factor being everything else, other than model ranking? It's already come for vast swathes of industries. Most organizations have already been able to operationalize what are essentially GPT4 and GPT5 wrappers for standard enterprise usecases such as network security (eg. Horizon3) and internal knowledge discovery and synthesis (eg. GleanAI back in 2024-25).
- 9cb14c1ec0 7mo agoYes, and that is why I used the phrase comparative value. The concept of winning business based on being #1 on the benchmarks is dead.
- alephnerd 7mo agoI agree, and most of my peers do as well. This is why most of us shifted to funding AI Applications startups back in 2023-24. Most of these players are still in stealth or aren't household names, but neither are ServiceNow, Salesforce, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, or Snowflake. Foundation Models have reached a relative plateau and much of the recent hype wasn't due to enhanced model performance but smart packaging on top of existing capabilities to solve business outcomes (eg. OpenClaw, Antheopic's business suite, etc). Most foundation model rounds are essentially growth equity rounds (not venture capital) to finance infra/DC buildouts to scale out delivery or custom ASICs to enhance operating margins. This isn't a bad thing - it means AI in the colloquial definition has matured to the point that it has become reality.
- sega_sai 7mo agoOkay, I can understand investment from SoftBank, and maybe somewhat from Amazon (if they plan to use OpenAI's models), but investment from NVidia who will then sell OpenAI the GPUs with X% markup doesn't make sense to me.
- chirau 7mo agoIf OpenAI is Pied Piper, who is Russ Hanneman in all this?
- bigfishrunning 7mo agoI would vote for Once-CEO-Then-not-then-CEO-Again Hypeman Sam Altman
- metalliqaz 7mo agoI like to point out that he was fired for egregious dishonesty.
- phist_mcgee 7mo agoJensen Huang? He put GPUs on the internet!
- benatkin 7mo agoI thought with OpenClaw they'd get more than a 3.67x multiplier of what Anthropic raised.
- BitsAndObjects 7mo agoCircular-breathing causes the air to heat up, causing expansion. This is how a balloon can expand even when someone is breathing air from inside it. s/breathing/investment/g s/balloon/bubble/g s/air/money/g
- layer8 7mo agoI performed the suggested substitution. What is the heating up of money in that analogy?
- BitsAndObjects 7mo agoSarcastically, it's "the vibes intensifying". (Vibes ~ Vibrations ~ Heat) Tbf it's a reasonable question... I think it's a little tricky to pin down the equivalent of "kinetic energy" in purely economic terms, though you might look at the rate of flow of money as some analogy for the speed/energy of particles (speed of individual dollars changing hands). In that sense, the more frequent and larger these deals get, the hotter the market is. This is not a novel analogy.
- trilogic 7mo agoSo let´s see if I understood well this one: Got 110 Billions with the promise that either AGI will happen soon (:) or going public before the end of the year. Eitherway you get to double your 110 Billions no matter what (who will be left to pay the full bill after it, public or public)? Very interesting, I will follow it closely, mostly to see how you ROI 110 Billions in a couple of years.
- paxys 7mo agoBig number gets bigger
- duxup 7mo agoFeels like Nvidia getting in the game here might just put them at more risk. If things don't work out they'll be out their money and future sales and so on. It is bad enough AI sucked up so much investment money, hitting companies that do make profitable things hard if AI bubble collapses would be bad...
- timpera 7mo agoHopefully this will allow them to continue to provide me unreasonable amounts of compute for €20/month. Enjoying it while it lasts…
- swarnie 7mo agoHave you tried to cancel recently? Might save you €20 next month.
- swarnie 7mo agoNot sure why this made people sad. If you try to cancel they just straight up give you a month for free. Take the VC money....
- aerhardt 7mo agoI feel the same. I can't believe the amount of shit I am throwing at Codex for a measly 20€.
- dfp33 7mo agoThis right here is the right attitude. Use these freebies/relatively cheap tools up 'whilst stocks last'. I personally managed to create a very high quality marketing promo vid using grok. After spending weeks of enduring a lot of pain. But I saved myself tens of thousands. I took advantage of 30 Grok premium subscriptions that were given to me via a free trial. There's no doubt the cost of services I took advantage of is in the tens of thousands. But what do I care? I get what I want and then I get out before the freebies disappear. LOL at the cry babys down-voting. Get mad bruh, get mad.
- rvnx 7mo agoWelcome to Claude Code; 200 USD at Claude, versus 3000 USD (literally) at Gemini. Well, then it will be Claude. If tomorrow Claude is 5000 USD, well, then it will be Gemini.
- medi8r 7mo agoReplace "claude code" with "fentanyl" and reread. This is what is called the drug dealer tactic. Once you need AI they will all cartel and you will pay half your salary (or your boss does) for it.
- whoami4041 7mo agoThat's a pretty lofty valuation for a company that has yet to demonstrate code generation anywhere near Anthropic's models if they're leaning into the engineering angle.
- reducesuffering 7mo agoMany engineers use Codex 5.3 and find it better, including Hashicorp's Mitchell.
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoAnd the OpenClaw guy
- sipjca 7mo agowho was bought by openai
- distrill 7mo agoi find codex 5.3 roughly on par with (though tbh still not quite as capable as) sonnet models, which are not even anthropic's flagship model family.
- brandly 7mo agoBy what measure do you think they're not anywhere near Anthropic's models?
- ruben81ad 7mo agoI dont see much of a difference betwen Claude,Codex and GLM with OpenCode. Any on them, nowadaws, works really, really, well.
- aerhardt 7mo ago"Calvinism makes pretty lofty claims for a religion who has yet to demonstrate soul salvation anywhere near Lutheranism if they're leaning into the reformation angle" - Someone in the 16th century, probably
- paxys 7mo agoTwo economists were walking down the street when they spotted a giant dog turd on the ground. One of them wanted to have some fun, so said to the other - "I'll give you $100 if you take a big bite of that turd". His colleague figured $100 was a good chunk of cash, so did the deed. Feeling thoroughly humiliated, he pocketed the $100 and they carried on. Further down the street they came upon another turd. The angry economist now wanted revenge so made the same proposal back to his colleague, who also agreed and took a bite of the turd, earning back his $100. Later one of them said to the other "you know, I can't help but feel we both ate shit for no reason." His collegue replied "what do you mean? We raised the national GDP by $200."
- whatever1 7mo agoThe number is irrelevant. The fact is that work was done and was repaid with work. Money was just the means of the transaction.
- well_ackshually 7mo agowork good even if work literally eating shit surely that behavior leads to a good society and doesn't encourage nefarious behaviors
- howardYouGood 7mo ago[dead]
- oersted 7mo agoI did upvote, it's witty, but it's a bit of a misrepresentation of how the economy works. In practice, people don't tend to pay people to eat shit without gain. You are paying people to help you. Money gaslights everyone into helping each other, the most selfish people become the most selfless. Of course, real capitalism is much more complex and much uglier than this fantasy. When certain people end up with long-term control of large piles of money, the whole thing gets distorted. They get to make lots of money on interest without doing anything, and making other people eat more shit for scraps. That's the "capital" part of capitalism. But the toy world-model that this joke is making fun of, is actually the one core positive aspect of capitalism and brings all the prosperity we have: tricking people into helping each other.
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoSource: https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180302)
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoSource: https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180302)
- jppope 7mo agoInteresting story for sure (to be clear I'm not talking about the writing by Reuters), but would you buy or skip the OpenAi IPO? To me it feels like one of those throw some play money into it and see what happens sort of situations. Expect it will return negative due to the raw financials and outlook, but small chance the brand carries enough weight with the public that it spikes. I'd love to hear other thoughts though
- epolanski 7mo agoIf the IPO was at 20B maybe I could throw a 1000$. But at such numbers it's nonsense. I don't see any moat. LLMs are commodities. Enterprise is on Gemini/NotebookLM and Copilot as it's a natural extension of the Google and Office suite they use. Devs are in Anthropic camp, but they will jump as soon as they can save 90% of the money for 99% of the output.
- pigeons 7mo agoDoes anyone have any ethical concerns using openai regarding money donated to the current US administration in one way or another? I will search for more accurate details about that situation. I know about several other ethical concerns with openai that people have, including copyright and other considerations regarding the work being trained on, as well as lack of action regarding users who are harmed by their usage of the product, often regarding mental health, environmental concerns, actually quite a few others, but I am interested if many people think their political donations are an issue or not.
- irishcoffee 7mo ago[flagged]
- himata4113 7mo agoLess than a decade ago companies reaching 1 trillion was still every much "out there". Now we have an IPO at almost 1 trillion. It's clear that the stock market cannot be considered normal anymore, held up on hopes at prayers at best.
- epolanski 7mo agoWell, it's still VC market right now, and all the investors have vetted interest into the music not stopping.
- aurareturn 7mo agoSure it can. The value of the dollar coincides with stock market valuations.
- danny_codes 7mo agoExactly. A devalued dollar means higher number without adjustment
- himata4113 7mo ago"UBS downgraded the US stock market" happened today for a reason and you're implying that the US dollar lost 1000% of it's value since less than a decade ago? 1/10th of what it is worth today?
- aurareturn 7mo agoWhere did you get 1000%? S&P500 is up 3.7x since 2016.
- himata4113 7mo agomy bad, I meant the evaluation of any single company
- namuol 7mo agoHard not to hear the word “bailout” in my head when I see this many billions being tossed around.
- criddell 7mo agoAt least investors like Amazon can afford to lose their investment ($50 billion). That would be like a normal person losing a few thousand dollars. It hurts, but life would go on.
- namuol 7mo agoThat’s still $100B unaccounted for, and I’m pretty sure Amazon would expect fair treatment if other investors get a bailout. More likely, OpenAI is the one to receive the bailout, likely at the behest of the bigger investors, Amazon included.
- scuff3d 7mo agoThat's why there's been such a massive effort to position LLMs as critical to national security. If they can make themselves big enough and critical enough (even in just perception) to the government they won't let them fail. They'll let individuals lose their livelihoods of course, since it's rugged individualism for all of us lowley normal people. But corporate socialism will keep the big players afloat.
- jameson 7mo agoDoes this mean they won't IPO this year?
- LZ_Khan 7mo agoOpenAI's just trading equity for GPU credits at this point?
- holografix 7mo agoIs OpenAI giving employees RSUs? What good are those under these astronomical valuations?
- azinman2 7mo agoPresumably it’s all relative. Apple gives me RSUs with a much higher valuation (although at least it’s on the public market already).
- whimsicalism 7mo agothey have PPUs
- xvector 7mo agoNo it's RSU now. But idk if anyone would want to join OpenAI at these levels. Are they really a $1T business? At least Anthropic has some runway in terms of valuation and isn't bleeding all over some free tier.
- 7777777phil 7mo ago$730B pre-money for a company where each model is roughly 2x profitable on its own, but each next model costs 10x the last. The whole thing only works if scaling keeps delivering. Research (Sara Hooker et al.) is not encouraging on that front, compact models already outperform massive predecessors on downstream tasks while scaling laws only predict pre-training loss reliably. Wrote about both the per-model math and the scaling question: (1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/ai-models-as-standalone-pls/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/ai-models-as-standalone-pls/ (2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-most-expensive-assumption-in-ai/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-most-expensive-assumptio... EDIT: Removed the dot after et; bc apparently it's an entire word (the more you know..)
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago> each model is roughly 2x profitable on its own, but each next model costs 10x the last. The whole thing only works if scaling keeps delivering. This is a decent argument, but it's not the death knell you think. Models are getting 99% more efficient every 3 years - to get the same amount of output, combined with hardware and (mostly) software upgrades - you can use 99% less power. The number of applications where AI is already "good enough" keeps growing every day. If the cost goes down 99% every three years, it doesn't take long until you can make a ton of money on those applications. If AI stopped progressing today, it would take probably a decade or longer for us to take full advantage of it. So there is tons of forward looking revenue that isn't counted yet. For the foreseeable future, there are MANY MANY uses of models where a company would not want to host its own models and would be GLAD to pay an 4-5x cost for someone else to host the model and hardware for them. I'm as bullish on OpenAI being "worth" $730B as I was on Snap being worth what it IPO'd for - which it's still down about 80% (AFTER inflation, or about ~95% adjusting for gold inflation). But guess what - these are MINIMUM valuations based on 50-80% margins - i.e. they're really getting about ~$30B - the rest is market value of hardware and hosting. OpenAI could be worth 80% less, and they could still make a metric fuck-ton of money selling at IPO with a $1T+ market cap to speculative morons easily... Realistically, very rich people with high risk tolerance are saying that they think OpenAI has a MINIMUM value of ~$100B. That seems very reasonable given the risk tolerance and wealth.
- CrzyLngPwd 7mo agoPuff puff until it pops!
- NoblePublius 7mo agoThe round is still open, Amazon is funding in tranches, and Sam doesnt get all the cash until he hits unknown metrics. Sounds like a down round.
- bentt 7mo agoSomeone please explain how OpenAI is not Netscape 2026. They had first mover advantage but no network effect, no moat, and are racing to stay ahead of infinitely resourced incumbents.
- beernet 7mo agoHow are ~1B active users not "moat"? Might have to pull out the "Haters gonna hate" like it's 2007
- kortilla 7mo agoUsers are not a moat because there is no network effect here.
- rvnx 7mo agoBut why are these users sticking to ChatGPT specifically ? If it’s not the quality of their answers ?
- Night_Thastus 7mo agoThey'll stay as long as it's cheap. The moment any attempt is made to raise the price, the number will crater.
- rvnx 7mo agoMaybe: “ok I’m lazy, the app is preinstalled on my phone and it’s free, there are some ads but ok”
- nickff 7mo agoIsn't that the 'bull case' for Gemini?
- rvnx 7mo agoHave the same feeling, they have Gemma-3 that is preparing to be on-device stuff, and getting deployed on iPhone if I understand it right. Then it can be something along the lines of "subscribe to Google XXX or Apple +++ and have 'unlimited' cloud requests"
- lysace 7mo agoOk, I'm getting out.
- mixmastamyk 7mo agoDepressing to see trillions sloshing around, and yet no jobs to be found.
- fillskills 7mo agoFeels like my cheese has been moved
- rvnx 7mo agoI have no idea what your sentence means (as a non-English native) but I feel you. Such a waste of burnt money that could be used for more useful projects.
- shimman 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F
- mixmastamyk 7mo agoIt's a short book giving obvious advice, that one needs to embrace change, using a metaphor of mice and cheese. It receives a lot of scorn for that, despite many needing to hear the message. I'm ready to embrace change, however in this case no one cares. The cheese hasn't just been moved, it has been taken to another planet where us mice are not allowed to go.
- runlaszlorun 7mo agoOh my gosh. I was hoping that book had died a terrible death...
- sp4cec0wb0y 7mo agoYeah and who is going to foot the bill when this comes crumbling down?
- lotsofpulp 7mo agoSurely some workers are needed to build the chips, hard disk drives, datacenter, and power plants.
- redleader55 7mo agoEveryone thinks this bubble will continue until AGI(bulls) or until someone calls them on it(bears). I think it will continue until someone finds a quick way to make cheap energy(bullish) or until we can't build more power plants to support AI growth(bearish). While nothing fancy has happened yet in the area of cheap energy, there is still enough power around the world to build AI data centers. The problem is this power exits in countries that the West has decided, many times for good reasons, they don't want to deal with their leaders. I'm predicting that over 2027, either the US will become more aggressive in making war with these countries or company CEOs will start developing "reality-distorsion-fields" around them and decide having enough power for the next datacenter is more for the good of humanity. Before that Europe will decide that AI training on human faces(eg. of non-Europeans) is not really a problem and will allow US companies to train their models in EU countries.
- marcosdumay 7mo agoThe bubble will continue until the FED stops printing or the dollar sees enough inflation that the printing becomes meaningless. Right now the US seems to not have a lot of inflation and the FED has every reason to print. So don't expect a burst, but this can change in a blink.
- davemp 7mo agoAmazon hedging $35 billion on an IPO (we know the odds of AGI with LLMs are vanishing small) is concerning. The hedge signals that they think it's a good "greater fool" investment, otherwise they should be happy to take equity in a company they think will be stable/profitable.
- mcbits 7mo agoThese are geopolitical activities akin to the arms buildup of the Cold War, but happening somewhat more openly through the guise of private sector investments. The names of the companies involved are ephemeral. The numbers "invested" are largely imaginary, just play money pumped into the system over the last few years, flowing around, searching for a place to park. The result will be a certain amount of tangible infrastructure in the form of datacenters, power plants, semiconductor fabs. It's a Hail Mary move to keep pace with a certain geopolitical competitor. This process may propel society to the next level or may collapse it, depending on how society chooses to use these resources and how successful the competitor is at its own similar endeavor.
- robotnikman 7mo agoGreat, now when are memory prices going to go back to normal?
- CabSauce 7mo agoDon't worry, if it all comes down, you'll be able to buy RAM and GPUs by weight.
- medi8r 7mo agoJust weird to read. "pre-money" implies startup, and 730B implies worth more than a good chunk of SP500
- Olshansky 7mo agoRemember when OpenAI sold half of itself for $10B?
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[flagged]
- MarcLore 7mo ago[dead]
- mattfrommars 7mo agomark my words, the entire stock market will need to float until openai goes public. there is no way openai - and players who are vested them can afford market to tank before it.
- munro 7mo agoChatGPT needs to catch up hard, for me their model is unusable and I cancelled my subscription 5-6 months ago, so to me this post is hot air. I need to see results, going back to try Codex 5.2, then 5.3, downloading their new desktop client, their VS code extension, their weird browser, is time I wish I had back.
- bg24 7mo agoLot of skepticism about OpenAI's survival. I am a user of both Claude (max) and Codex (plus). Some neutral points. - Anthropic owes to AWS for their enterprise growth. Yes, their own talent as well. - AWS investing for a purpose - solving problems with multi-agent systems - "exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, which enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents.". I think the multi-agent landscape will be production-ready in 2026 for solving really complex problems. AWS saw something in Codex and OpenAI's models. - On Circular investments - if you make $100B of your revenue from ecosystem of players who spend $50B on your infra... where else would you go? I work for another cloud provider, not AWS.
- vicchenai 7mo ago$730B pre-money is remarkable context for an industry that barely existed commercially a decade ago. Worth noting the implied revenue multiple here - OpenAI reportedly hit $4B ARR in 2024, so this round prices them at ~180x forward revenue. For comparison, Salesforce peaked at ~12x. The bull case obviously requires AGI-level defensibility that makes traditional SaaS multiples irrelevant. The bear case is that frontier model costs continue compressing (DeepSeek effect) and commoditization erodes the moat before the network effects lock in. Either way, this is a defining data point for how markets price transformative but uncertain technology.
- inder1 7mo ago$730B on roughly $11B ARR is ~66x. Microsoft trades at 12x. The market is pricing OpenAI as infrastructure, not software. That's probably right. The implication is that the productivity gains accrue to whoever controls the infrastructure layer. The workers and companies building on top of it are taking the displacement risk without the upside.
- trvz 7mo agoInfrastructure is replacable and a race to the bottom though. If OpenAI fails, you just change the endpoint URL and API key in your software.
- rakibyte 7mo agoTheir users are there as long as they have the money to fund the pro plans for free to the users. Which is not a long term solution
- paradox_hash 7mo ago[dead]
- devcraft_ai 7mo ago[flagged]
- gigatexal 7mo agoThe best part of this post is learning about xcancel
- podgorniy 7mo agoWhat is nature of money invested? What is mechanism of getting returns?
- tonyhart7 7mo agoso the AI bubble is far from gone right ????
- pfd1986 7mo agoWhat's the math here if they go public in 2027, with next to 1T in valuation? How much more growth can the company have for regular investors? Surely they won't have the capital of multiple FAANG companies...
- epic_ai 7mo ago[flagged]
- casey2 7mo agoGoogle has enough momentum at this point to make the startups technically irrelevant, and they've only just started speeding up. Arguably they've already leapfrogged Anthropic and OpenAI in every field that matters, infrastructure, distribution, price, verification, all google, enterprise and actual model intelligence, currently a toss up but google is improving the fastest, SOTA in so many categories eventually this will coincide with the FOTM.
- cannabis_sam 7mo agoThis is simply a symptom of economic misallocation, decades of wealth concentration has moved the incentives away from normal healthy investments, to a minuscule minority desperately trying to chase ever shrinking short term gains, when all they are really doing is gambling on hooking the next tech evolutionary whale. So much human potential given to such a tiny group of incompetent morons. When the history books are being written, this era will make the robber baron/gilded age pale in comparison.
- sarbanharble 7mo agoWe live in the golden age of the grift.
- agnishom 7mo agoPlease excuse my finance illiteracy. What's pre-money valuation?
- aiauthoritydev 7mo agoThis seems very risky and worse is that there is a good chance our money will be used to bail them out.
- riteshyadav02 7mo ago[dead]