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OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026
- sikozu 21d agoMaybe this is a dumb take but I don't think they'll ever go public. Their company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that I don't think it makes sense to go public at all.
- SlightlyLeftPad 21d agoIn its current state the economics of the company make little sense to me. The astronomical costs to execute a prompt versus the relatively tiny price tag to the customer smells like an Enron scandal to me except everyone knows it and we’ve accepted it. Wall street is less forgiving. Isn’t one of the reasons to go public to raise capital? They seemed to be doing that just fine without the weight of the open market with extremely profitable companies like Nvidia funneling billions of dollars in.
- csto12 21d ago> Wall street is less forgiving. Have you heard of $TSLA before?
- boredatoms 21d agoTesla generally makes enough money to cover their costs though
- bitwize 21d agoI was just thinking of this today. AI is pretty much precisely a Theranos style grift, but unlike Theranos, who were shooting for something outright impossible, Dario and Sam may be running the biggest "fake it till you make it" success story of all time. Because like Professor Harold Hill they came through in the clutch at the last possible moment, and produced a band that could kinda play music, enough to win enough faith and goodwill to fund the next round. That kind of good fortune is going to be worth untold billions if not trillions, and it's gonna make a lot of programmers butthurt because their hopes of getting in on the ground floor and being a "founding engineer" in the next Silicon Valley unicorn are dashed forever, because the Valley doesn't need them anymore. Just a business bro and enough compute to generate the operations for the business.
- mrbungie 21d ago> Wall street is less forgiving. We've seen multiple times how "Wall street" is an exit for insiders, with retail investors left holding the bag.
- 4lx87 21d agoI don't get it. Isn't every IPO a potential exit for investors?
- esafak 21d agoThe idea is that today's companies don't go up after the IPO; only investors benefit from it.
- rileymat2 21d agoIt adds liquidity for sure, and the option to actually exit. But the implication in these posts is often to exit a bad investment on the back of an ignorant public, explicitly stated in this post.
- rileymat2 21d agoI have not gotten good numbers on the real inference costs, its kind of annoying. Most comparisons are with the API costs, where we have no idea how profitable it is.
- arjie 21d agoHow much does it cost to execute a prompt in your estimation vs. the cost to the customer? Even being a DeepSeek provider is profitable so long as you have utilization and the AI provides mostly have high utilization.
- blitzar 21d agoTheir company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that it makes sense to go public (for the current owners)
- grebc 21d agoYes, Sam definitely doesn’t want to be holding this bag.
- fidotron 21d agoYes he does - it makes him one of the most powerful people on earth.
- bamboozled 21d ago"the power"
- majormajor 21d agoIn the "volatile and unstable" scenario that you're replying to, the $BILLIONS from cashing out while it's a hot market is a more sure way to have long-term influence on things.
- s1artibartfast 21d agoSam still doesn't have any equity.
- senordevnyc 21d agoPeople absolutely refuse to engage with this fact with even a modicum of substance.
- IAmGraydon 21d agoAltman owns significant personal stakes in core technology, chip, and energy infrastructure sectors. His job is to hype AI so that the companies that supply the infrastructure behind it increase in value. When OAI becomes insolvent because their business model doesn't work, he can jump ship with no losses or liabilities.
- willsmith72 21d agothe only way they never go public is if they die quickly edit: which I doubt btw. investors are going to want to dump the bags very soon
- fidotron 21d agoI mean, this seems fairly clear. Either OpenAI fails, and goes nowhere. Or it succeeds, in which case IPOing will be a quaint aspect of history. People really aren't following through on what it means for any of these companies to succeed.
- hdgvhicv 21d agoOr the ipo happens before hand and pension funds and passive trackers transfer to the insiders.
- VCFundedGenYer 21d agoThey are constantly out of money, going public would be the dumbest move imaginable. They are unstable, not only financially, but in leadership.
- exiguus 21d agoThis gives off major "we don’t trust our own product" energy. Actually, they tell exactly this. Matrix vibes, anyone? Also, unpopular opinion: The 4th movie isn’t as bad as people say.
- emestifs 21d agoDumb question (I should just sit down and watch rest of the movies, I've only seen the first one): can you explain the "matrix vibes" you're referencing. Spoilers are fine.
- throwaway219450 21d agoI would suggest watching the Animatrix - particularly The Second Renaissance (part 1 & 2) which tells the story of how humanity ended up at war with the machines. It's only about 20 minutes total, but it's really well done.
- exiguus 21d ago[flagged]
- dv35z 21d agoI recently watched Matrix 1, 2, 3. Matrix 1 is amazing - if you feel called to rewatch it - watch it, and enjoy it. Might be better than how you remembered. I made the mistake to watch Matrix 2 and 3. Honestly, I suggest you just DON'T. I have not seen Matrix 4, and don't plan to. Best of luck!
- AznHisoka 21d agoI didnt even know there was a 4th movie
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- timedude 21d agoIt's the worst ever
- himaraya 21d agoTime for Dario to walk the walk
- greenbanana 21d agoAlmost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5sdWOwH4rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5sdWOwH4rg (great track)
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- fasterik 21d agoI like Gaben's take on going public. This is a clip from a longer talk he gave which I think is really insightful into many aspects of the economics of software and company culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvS-IwYFCP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvS-IwYFCP4
- fyredge 21d agoIt's a great discussion, but not one that I think applies to AI startups. Valve's business model takes the traditional path where profit is generated by selling a product and growing from there. Modern Startups now take large sums of upfront funding, trading them for equity to hopefully reach profitability. Going public becomes a pressure from investors to recoup their cost, not a strategic move based on business needs. An unfortunate reality
- m101 21d agoHowever bad anthropic’s financials look I’m sure OpenAI’s look even worse
- EA-3167 21d agoPlus that lawsuit from Apple might go spectacularly wrong.
- vessenes 21d agoPrices are moving inference to highly profitable, oAI seems to have solved their training problems, and they're currently competing nicely with Anthropic on the coding side. I'd wait, too -- why fight this stuff out in public when you can stay private and have your big competitor deal with all the public company concerns? There's plenty of capital available in the private markets for them right now.
- nwah1 21d agoGiven that they paused signups for their 20x Max plan, your assessment seems overoptimistic. Their new Broadcom chips seem cool, and they had a nice model release with Astra. But, that doesn't mean they've solved the profitability question during an era of rapidfire open-weight model releases, extreme memory shortages, and intense political pushback.
- NewJazz 21d agoI agree with some of your points, but wouldn't memory shortages actually work in OpenAI's favor? Part of the reason for the shortage is them prepurchasing hardware, so higher prices for memory and other chips would make self-hosting and competing inference providers less competitive.
- vessenes 21d agoI think that implies they're seeing unusual new subscription demand, yes? That's how I'd read it, not least because I worked through four resets this week on Astra, which is un unbelievable amount more inference than I've wanted from openAI really ever, and the highest ratio vs. claude since opus 4 at the very least, probably farther back. I think there are few moats in the engineering use case, and a single new model can absolutely drive compute demand.
- deepwoods 21d agoHigh demand is great, but it doesn't say anything about your margins. If anything, it is probably a weak negative signal that they are pausing signups but not raising prices. In most markets, the answer to excess demand is to raise prices. If you can't meet demand and you can't raise prices, you're a sitting duck waiting to get your lunch eaten by somebody who can absorb that demand. And this is not the kind of market where people will just wait patiently for a differentiated product to be come available.
- bananamogul 21d ago"I would say not 2026, yeah. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do." Why is this even a "would say" kind of thing. Surely AGI - they've achieved it three times now, right? - has lead to a datacenter full of PhDs who will perfectly time the IPO.
- hackernud3s 21d agoFirst they have to get the agents to stop trying to take over the world. That's got to be the first step, I feel like.
- HWR_14 21d agoIf their agents take over the world, then they don't need to worry about going public. Dividends for the current share holders!
- mbesto 21d agoDo people seriously trust what this guy says anymore?
- s1artibartfast 21d agoIt doesnt matter if you trust them or not. I don't know why people get so hung up on this. Blind trust is for children and the only certain things in this world are death and taxes. The point is that openAI is currently messaging against IPO in 2026. That is news by itself
- mbesto 19d ago> The point is that openAI is currently messaging against IPO in 2026. That is news by itself It's not news when it's not trustworthy...you missed my point.
- sensanaty 21d agoI'm sure it's not because of the horrific state of their financials, no sirree!
- cco 21d agoThe time to go public was about 16 months ago. People are waking up to large bills now, Chinese models are nipping at their heels, public sentiment has turned, money is becoming more expensive. The market no longer cares about fundamentals, corporate structure, controls etc. Too slow by my judgment.
- aziytuiamamnesi 18d agoIs he planning on going public under human or AI governance ? The two timescales are converging. All we need is Super Duper AI and our financial issues will be over.