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Maybe 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
by sikozu 20d ago
Maybe 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 20d 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 20d ago> Wall street is less forgiving. Have you heard of $TSLA before?
- boredatoms 20d agoTesla generally makes enough money to cover their costs though
- bitwize 20d 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 20d 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 20d agoI don't get it. Isn't every IPO a potential exit for investors?
- esafak 20d agoThe idea is that today's companies don't go up after the IPO; only investors benefit from it.
- rileymat2 20d 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 20d 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 20d 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 20d agoTheir company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that it makes sense to go public (for the current owners)
- grebc 20d agoYes, Sam definitely doesn’t want to be holding this bag.
- fidotron 20d agoYes he does - it makes him one of the most powerful people on earth.
- bamboozled 20d ago"the power"
- majormajor 20d 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 20d agoSam still doesn't have any equity.
- senordevnyc 20d agoPeople absolutely refuse to engage with this fact with even a modicum of substance.
- IAmGraydon 20d 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 20d 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 20d 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 20d agoOr the ipo happens before hand and pension funds and passive trackers transfer to the insiders.
- VCFundedGenYer 20d agoThey are constantly out of money, going public would be the dumbest move imaginable. They are unstable, not only financially, but in leadership.