OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon
wsj.com
wsj.com
Context - Deepseekv4 is freely available to download you can host your own and sell it keeping the proceeds and it rivals Claude Opus 4.7.
"Thank you for your attention to this matter"
good luck getting a machine that can run its specs though. Even flash is goign to require ponying up 5-10 grand to run the minimal specs for it. The vast majority of people will find their machine falls behind as tech progresses long before they get a return on that investment. That said, it does mean there will be a healthy market for "generic providers" in the AI landscape with these open weight models.
Investment is not basic math. Its also dependencies to US companies, trust etc.
We’ve all seen how the “math” on so much of the AI business sector literally doesn’t check out, and here there are: still ballooning, still making deals, still directly crafting laws through political influence, still taking over damn near every user space.
Politics at a high enough level lets you play a different game with different rules.
Politics at a low enough level lets you do the same actually, but we usually call that civil unrest, guerrilla warfare, or collective action depending on how many of which group is defying which “rules”.
It’s very easy to get used to the guardrails and guidelines around us when they persist and succeed for decades, but they are much more fragile than they appear.
That's any machine that can physically host the weights and context. You'd need a highly-specced machine for better performance and throughput, but it's not a requirement as far as literally executing the model and getting output.
If you know exactly what you want and when you need the results, calculating a hardware floor becomes deterministic. If you don't need the results right away, or if you're comfortable gluing together results yourself, pretty much any box released in the past decade can be doing work for you.
For a quick experiment grab a few images and a one-line prompt e.g. "describe these pictures", and bounce that set off every model/quant you can reach. If you record quality, rate, and cost of each request there might be regions of
`"good enough", "good enough", "electricity + sweat"`
in the resulting spreadsheet. And this is multimodal. Single-mode classification is dirt cheap.
It's worth noting I suspect a key reason Chinese companies are doing this is, in part, tacit encouragement and logistical enablement from the Chinese government. Playing spoiler by nerfing the valuations of over-inflated U.S. AI leaders is a decent strategy given the current GPU disparity.
Having the software stack get dirt-cheap and multi-vendor is good for hardware players. I'd argue there's even huge value in developing tooling that's less nVidia-centric for the health of the overall market, and the fact China is filled with other hardware manufacturers that want a bite at that margin and insatiable demand.
My understanding is that it's unreasonable to claim a hotel isn't profitable when they're still on the building stage.
I do understand that we don't have enough energy to turn it on when all of them are delivered, but that's a separate issue.
e: gah. Answered to the wrong post. Sorry.
... but they did it in a place and culture filled with people who would probably sell their own mothers into slavery if they were allowed to provided it increased the valuation of their startup, so here we are.
Eh... what's left to build? Actual AI?
It's not unreasonable at all, it's a honest description of the hotel's current situation. Would you call it profitable?
If a hotel stays on the building stage for half a decade, getting a loan after another to pay for that, that unprofitability is acutely relevant.
https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-nears-first-quart...
That being said, it does look like it's being partially subsidized by Elon burning lots of money. We'll see if he can keep it up or if it will be left behind as hardware evolves.
It COULD reach $10.9 billion. It COULD also completely shit itself and go bust. We'll just all have a fun time finding out together, won't we, investors?
Ever notice that, by the way? There's a lot of exciting, non-GAAP shit going around in this field.
You're looking at this on the idea of a missed prediction. That's not where I'm at with this. I think Anthropic is straight-up lying. I think they are genuinely making shit up. This isn't a financial forecast, it's bullshit to hype up investors without actually having to prove it's based on anything whatsoever. It's either pure bullshit, or the numbers are so massaged and delivered at such a highly specific angle that it only becomes a logical way to display data if you're an MBA with a concussion.
We have absolutely 0 reason to believe what they're saying is true. We have lots of reasons to believe they'll say shit if they think they'll get more money out of it (see: every time they open their mouths and journalists rush to copy-paste the quote into headlines).
My Aunt runs an accounting firm and is constantly moaning about the number of people who have over accumulated cash from IPOs and have no clue what to do with it all.
If you have two million euros lying around, that would be life-changing money for me. I'd put everything into VWCE and then live off interest. I think I'd spend a year in Japan just to see what it's like, then travel around a few other countries, and finally settle somewhere back in Europe - buy a small house in the middle of nowhere, renovate it, and then smoke weed and play video games until the end of my days.
I'm not sure what's exactly your point besides "if everyone does exactly the same thing, then society collapses".
I cannot imagine having untold amounts of money only to do nothing afterwards except consume the stuff put in front of you.
It's enough for a modest retirement.
There's a non-trivial chance "working hard" as defined by the modern ethos is doing more damage than good.
This might be less fun than you imagine.
At which point the plan becomes something you can put into action tomorrow, if you wanted. It's like the parable of the Mexican fisherman: https://www.thekinnardhomestead.com/the-parable-of-the-mexic...
Stoner WoW addicts working dead-end jobs live better than kings did in previous centuries, and we're too status-obsessed to notice this.
If I manage not to get fired for 12 years then I'll reach the endgame.
There's laws and shit about that. You can't just immigrate to a country illegally.
That’s at least my generalized perspective.
(And China is a state capitalist economy)
China has done well, but the rest of the BRICS categorization makes no sense to me. India (and also Pakistan) are behind China on renewables but are having a huge surge right now.
If anything, Russia is a prime example of inefficient allocation of resources.
And I don't see what you are seeing on the rest of BRICS.
I don't even think I want to take a guess on OpenAI. I just don't think they can deliver a good product that aligns with my own moral compass, while trying to generate profit for shareholders.
But tech is also one of the fields that is more prone to disruption.
Nvidia is consistently one product away from it's competitors to eat highly into their margins.
Google may have a stronger moat. No company in Italy I'm aware of is using anything but copilot or Gemini/notebooklm (talking legal, insurance, etc, not tech) because they are natural extension to the cloud and Microsoft 365 existing plans.
Recency bias seem to push investors to ignore those risks and plenty reason like you: they use recent hindsight to project future growth.
Their current Forward PE is absolutely insane given the size of the company.
> NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
The spec is the value. And the patents.
In the AI Bear scenario, NVIDIA is obviously overvalued.
In the AI Bull scenario, we get full automation of software engineering. With "just a few clicks", an AMD employee can extract and replicate whatever subset of the spec is needed for AI workloads. Didn't the Google vs Oracle case find that copying an API can be fair use? And NVIDIA's patents haven't stopped Google from training on TPUs have they?
When a new architecture drops, it's always PyTorch running on CUDA, other PyTorch backends are best effort, even if they reach feature parity, many industry power users went closer to the metal to squeeze performance and that stuff is too specific to Nvidia stuff.
if there is something that will beat Nvidia, it won't be something reaching feature parity with slightly better economics (like AMD, also Nvidia could just reduce their margins), it needs to be a novel approach worth rewriting the codebase for (maybe Cerebras, maybe a new player).
How much actual diversity is there among standard AI workloads? I would expect this is an 80/20 thing where 80% of the workload uses 20% of the features.
>Nvidia could just reduce their margins
Commoditization is great for stock prices ;-)
AMD engineered something called HIP which is CUDA API compatible libraries that targets AMD's hardware, it's the closest thing we have for drop-in replacement to Nvidia's software moat.
It works for simple stuff but loses terribly for frontier kernels (like Flash Attention 3), novel approaches (e.g. Mamba) or networking (e.g. NCCL), also they are rough on the edges, so what you gain from GPU costs is lost in engineering cost.
My previous company tried to compete in this GPU game while putting effort to have a good software stack (Rivos), drop in replacement and cheaper with decent software.
But that vision was rough, any new player had to implement the bad APIs due to backward compatibility concerns, following specs wasn't sufficient as a lot of the AI stack was depending on observable effects (Hyrum's Law), and Nvidia simply just had a long head start, the company is now dead (acquired by Meta) and AFAIK there isn't another player.
Best case scenario AMD puts more effort into their software stack but I just think they do not have enough internal talent to compete.
Training will continue to be an Nvidia's thing and that's where most of the money sits, unless suddenly the AI research scene pivots to using JAX but I do not see it coming any time soon, if anything, I've seen internal efforts at Google to make PyTorch work nicely with TPUs. Some players like Anthropic started using JAX for training but all the small players are using Nvidia, I'm guessing it has something to do with Nvidia partnering aggressively with startups.
I wonder how big the market is for consumer/etc vs these massive installations?
AMD, Apple and Intel all sell raster GPUs. Their GPU architecture is not optimized for general-purpose compute, and reorienting around that goal would create a "Fifteen Competing Standards" scenario pretty quickly. It's as much of a hardware issue as it is a software one, and none of these businesses like to cooperate (see: the last 15 years of Khronos drama).
In AMD's case, they don't see a need to sell consumer GPUs with a true CUDA analog since their datacenter product is architecturally distinct from their GPUs. Consumers come to AMD for cheap graphics performance, and adding additional hardware on top of the SMs would be a waste of money for many (or most) customers. This is why you see such a rift between CDNA and RDNA chips on compute workloads, and why it's unlikely that we'll see a CUDA-equivalent product out of AMD any time soon.
Sure, but to state the obvious that is only a factor for people using CUDA !
There are also whole segments of the AI market, like Google using TPUs, Amazon using Trainium chips where CUDA is irrelevant.
If the AI boom is really going to happen, then inference volume needs ramp up and dominate training costs, and the winners are going to be whoever can do inference the cheapest, which probably isn't going to be anyone paying the NVIDIA tax !
The benefit of CUDA is more for development, and the hyperscalers serving models that use CUDA APIs - bespoke business models. Anthropic currently support both CUDA and Trainium, and X.ai (who seem to be fizzling out) are CUDA, although there was some talk of Musk getting Samsung to make "AI chips" of some sort.
As far as AMD goes, I'm sure the developers at AMD's biggest sites - the exascale national labs - have a whole other level of support than consumers, and no doubt a toolset that works great for those fixed environments.
Well yes. People have said this since at least 2012, and we're still waiting for a CUDA-killer in 2026.
Chinese fabs can't import cutting-edge silicon, and they can't manufacture EUVL at scale either. I have no reservations concerning China's ability to innovate, but the blockers are enormous and have succeeded in preventing China from accessing the true HPC market for over a decade now.
While Khronos struggled to get their vendors on the same page, Nvidia didn't. CUDA GPUs ship with clearly-defined support windows, Compute Capabilities, hardware documentation, PTX support, datacenter drivers, Linux/UNIX support, portable libraries, synergistic desktop products and capable edge SOCs. All of them walk in lockstep and typically dominate performance-per-watt comparisons against similar products. It's a lineup that's hard to surmount.
You can bet against Nvidia, but you'd better put your money on a fast horse. None of the big OEMs are taking CUDA seriously, and the bet against industry-wide cooperation is paying dividends that will be hard to justify competing with.
But I recently added POET, CBRS and similar. I think whatever happens, "shovel sellers" will be the main winners in this bubble.
The truth is somewhere in between probably.
What changed? They came out with one leading models for 2 weeks and that's all you needed to switch 180?
Google is still printing money in ads. That's the only thing they got for them. This will eventually get disrupted and I don't see them leading to something else.
Besides that they have a cultural issue. Nobody joins Google to work hard. Their brand name is synonymous with retirement and rest-and-vest. They also don't pay top of the market as they used to.
Right now a lot of people seem to think as you given their stock are very forward looking. My advice is don't get into the current hype cycle and wait for things to calm down. This is the equivalent of "Google is dead" that we saw a couple years ago.
Enron entered the chat.
It's not only an AI company, it's the symbol of AI hype. This AI hype is significant part of the US economy, and the AI infrastructure spending basically half of its growth.
("it's not this it's that", I swear it's human generated slop)
The only next step is the public market.
That's surprising to me; I thought (or heard) that it was low 3-digit millions.
We prefer red blooded American scam artists here, buddy. Hell, Elon probably found some bullshit way to recognize Chinese AI as Twitter revenue, used to buy cyberattacks to sell to SpaceX.
Knowledge Atlas Technology (Z.ai): 57B
MiniMax Group: 26B
Deepseek: 45B (rumored)
Can public markets go higher? Shiller P/E is closing in on the peak of the dot-com bubble:
https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
This is already close to being the frothiest market in US history.
Consider two competing forecasts for AI: it's a "normal technology", or it will be superintelligent.
If it's a "normal technology", where's the moat? Why won't this turn into a boring commodity business, like telecom after the bubble? Sure, railroads transformed the US, but that didn't prevent investors from losing a bunch of money first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900502
If it's superintelligence, we're most likely either all dead (in which case you helped cause human extinction by investing, congratulations) or else we're living on generous UBI: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/you-have-only-x-years-to-es...
Shiller PE is near 44. Japan had an equivalent price to earnings ratio of over 70 during their 1989 bubble.
If EU depositors want exposure to US AI firms, why didn't they already withdraw their money to invest in Microsoft/Google/etc.? I'm a bit doubtful that an OpenAI IPO is going to trigger major shifts in asset allocation.
If you think you can get all the _public_ to pull their short term bank deposits into stock .. well, (a) you've not met the Germans, and (b) that is how the economy of Albania collapsed in a pyramid scheme.
At the same time of these companies IPO'ing, they are also trying to bend the rules of the index funds and their markets (Nasdaq,S&P 500) so that they can get listed into these index funds asap.
And when these happens at such obscene levels, what happens is that a very sizable chunk of the S&P will get into these companies (5-10% is a very large number for a single company especially such companies within these index funds IMO)
and their whole plan is that then banks and other investments sitting on cash would then invest in it. Oh by the way, your retirement funds might also be linked to it all.
The fact is that there is a race with multiple companies (SpaceX,Anthropic,OpenAI) all trying to IPO and get listed on the stock markets as soon as possible.
BTW, in Shiller's book which was published right as the dot-com bubble popped, he has a chapter listing out similar late 90s structural factors, many of which could lead to permanently higher stock prices in theory.
Fortunately for them, the current SEC is highly in favor of short-term market manipulation.
How many public companies even get 122b? They definitely can go higher if they really are that valuable. With public companies come the other factors which might not be based on the actual value and can cause people to throw money.
Kind of a radical idea. I did read about that in economy books way back when at uni... but I don't think it's really happening actual. At least my walled doesn't seem to get it.
PS: it's a joke, free market works when there is competition. VCs are making damn sure it's just enough monopolies that they get wealthier while consumers themselves get milked. Without antitrust actually being enforced, there is no free market.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-consumer-go...
Splendidly interesting times.
Banks make money by giving out loans is a meme, but it's actually true here. You kind of need collateral to do that, but a stock of a company which has revenue is a perfectly cromulent collateral even by strict standards. It's not even some infinite money glitch - it's kinda how the whole system is supposed to work.
The stock market is largely about betting on expectations of future value while money is just a token which is used to settle things. E.g. if you think about simplified mechanics of IPO, say, investor Alice buys OpenAI shares, OpenAI gets the money and Alice has shares. If for simplicity we assume that Alice and OpenAI use same bank and there are no intermediaries, then it literally just updates two cells in a database. And Alice now has shares which is an asset of known value, thus can be borrowed against, etc. Also, say, OpenAI can use that money to repay debt, then perhaps lender would buy SpaceX stocks - it's not like money was withdrawn from the system.
Of course, there can be some interference: multiple companies do IPO around same time it would reduce FOMO, and if they did it literally in one day there might be lack of liquidity.
Will they eat each others potential capital appetite? Or is there just that much laying around for them all to gobble up the bag?
EDIT - but that's just the IPO, I wasn't even thinking about how much insiders will want to sell after the lockup ends...
I would invest in OpenAI or Anthropic or both but I doubt I'd invest in SpaceX.
The thing I'm most worried about with SpaceX is bundling X.com, xAI with it. I don't want to invest in X.com nor xAI.
Lastly, I don't my money tied to the Elon rollercoaster.
If OpenAI IPOs, then investors will expect a return. OpenAI can't generate that, so they'll be forced to slash R&D, stop datacenter roll outs and layoffs, so what's left? A model that will grow stale in six month, massive commitments and debt?
There's an article from today where if they double their current revenue to $10.9B they will make ~$500M profit. Maybe I just can't count, but that's a margin of ~5% no?
These numbers should be inference only: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-nears-first-quart...
Are we now suggesting people get out of index funds?
Worse, will this and spacex ipo destroy the index funds?
Care to explain the mechanics? I’m an investor (both in passive and more active vehicles) and don’t understand what you mean.
They own more of bigger companies than small.
There's the option of "equal weight" or other strategies but the overwhelming majority is market cap weighted.
Index funds are also really, really big now and contain a lot of money earmarked for retirement/pensions.
In theory if you had a temporarily very frothy market into which you could sell a part of your unprofitable company to some people at a very high valuation, index funds would then mechanically move in and need to purchase and add significant support for insiders to sell into.
Due to the high valuation, index funds are required to buy SpaceX stock, which Elon will presumably slowly sell them in order not to crash the stock. The funds will be left holding the stock, while eventually the price will crash, because the company will simply not make enough money to justify the valuation.
Musk owns about 50% of SpaceX. You are saying he is planning to sell the vast majority of that holding at a gradual pace that will not be noticed by anyone but fast enough to get a high price?
Many investors haven’t figured that out yet but they will eventually and they will be the ultimate bag holders once the bubble bursts for Tesla for good.
There are other companies that are remnants of what they were but they still survive on hype. It just takes a long time for them to die. Another example of that is IBM. They are functionally done in the tech world. It just takes a long time to die other companies that fit that mold is Xerox and Kodak still floating at a much lower level, but they are functionally done.
But they are and that's the key part of the scam. The index funds will have to buy these, since they are so highly valued. Index funds in turn are very popular investment devices used by pension funds, banks, individuals etc.
I think you may not understand the problem. As noted, unmanaged/passive index funds invest using market capitalization as a metric. And anybody who is invested in these ETFs thus unknowingly buy into these astronomically overhyped companies, and once these company valuations fall (and they will), pension funds/IRAs/401k will be the bagholders.
- With the SP500 you're not that diversified because you're very exposed to the tech sector
- With a world ETF like MSCI World you're still extremely exposed to US stocks (about 70%) and of course the tech sector
Not necessarily
ETF managers execute block trades outside the normal market, sometimes through dark pools, not even reported to the public.
Fidelity, Vanguard, etc ask JPMorgan, Goldman to execute these block trades and pay them a fee. This fee can exceed the “slippage” a retail investor can face.
So I am sure this is not viable for many people as buying an ETF counts like 1 trade, but investing the same money in the underlying assets count like 10s of trades.
More seriously, I would still worry about order execution and transaction costs. You are likely to end up on the wrong side of the bid/ask spread when playing against the big boys.
If you're actually serious about this, you might as well start your own ETF. Or just buy this one I found after a quick Google: https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/spxt Buying multiple sector-specific ETFs is another approach. I'm told that utilities are good to hold during a downturn.
ETF are just noob introduction to the stock market and great one at that but to maximize returns you want to be more specific and intentional about your picks.
Where etfs are great even after you learn a lot, is exposure to whole sectors of the industry. That’s how I treat them: one - etf - an index of how a particular industry fares.
Source: I basically live solely from investments at 30
Honestly it’s a free for all game so no one has any interest to share their secrets and methods. When you lose money I make money. Better player wins.
That's unbelievable! Even Warren Buffet only makes 19% - 20% compounded every year. That would make you one of the top investors ever.
Not really.
Plenty of hedge funds and HFT firms make 40-100% each year (before fees) over 30-40 years…
Citadel’s “stock picking ability” is 40% annual returns since 1999
They just don’t advertise this because it’ll make retail traders and passive ETF investors really sad
You could hit up juleiie from above for his/her winning method I suppose, or you put a portion of your savings into an appropriate ETF and get on with your life.
Nay, it is not just “ok”. It is imperative that you diversify if you want a strong and resilient portfolio.
I am sure nothing bad will happen
Both SpaceX and OpenAI's estimated free float are around 4-5% of their shares at IPO. This means that we really are talking about companies in the sub $100M valuation in term of index fund impact (assuming under $2T for each).
But it gets worse because when the lock-up period expires in 180 days after ipo (currently scheduled right before quarterly index rebalancing), it's possible that frees up more than 20% of float and it suddenly has to be weighted at the full 100% of market cap -- triggering additional automatic buying.
It certainly seems like it's set up for our retirement accounts to be the insider's exit liquidity.
In your scenario, that 100% cap would by definition be less than 5x float so it shouldn't trigger any more buying than the lock-up expiration itself did.
Do you mean if free float goes from 5% to 100%, and weighting goes from 25% to 100%, it's more "extra supply" than "extra demand"? That's a good point I hadn't considered. I'm not sure the details of the lock-up period though, it might be staggered. So if it goes from 5% float to 50% float, that's 45% of additional shares available to buy, but an addition 75% of the market cap that indices now need to weight to. But it's true this would only happen once (when free float goes from below 20% to above). Then after that the extra supply would be more than the extra demand. Or do I misunderstand?
They’re all down significantly from the date of going public.
I don’t really see how the price of OAI et al can go up - it’s already richly priced! The only way is down imo. But how much?
Considering how much they were priced a year ago even dropping 20% wouldn’t be bad… it’d be bad for insiders if the drop prolongs prior to the lock up period which is long enough to cause an even steeper drop. Also depending on the float - any non public trading shares face an illiquidity discount.
So as we can clearly observe: "AGI" which at this point is (A Giant IPO) is almost here.
Now all of humanity will benefit from this being e̶x̶i̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶q̶u̶i̶d̶i̶t̶y̶ shared by everyone for everyone. Right?
So what does it mean in this particular case? The board and investors probably don’t see it being realistic to become profitable soon, and maybe even worry about AI ceiling, so they want to profit now
The only thing we can realistically glean from IPO is the need for more funds which are not able to be provided by private markets on the terms a private lender/investor may want.
Insiders will profit from this liquidity event, but I suspect the earliest investors will stay put only liquidating enough to make their funds look great while still keeping an eye on the future growth.
Edit: Or has so much somehow changed in two weeks that it’s no longer necessary to wait until next year?
Perhaps they will just tell a lot of lies.
In the past people would generally avoid this when it came to stock market filings for fear of legal consequences, but the OpenAI C-Suite is already at least +$26 million to Trump and has plenty more to send his way if that doesn't cover it.
Crime is legal in 2026 (if you can afford the kickback fees).
1. "Look, even OpenAI, which is the face of the LLM tech with ChatGPT, needs assistance from POTUS to stay afloat, the tech is not profitable"
2. "Crap, all this circular economy going on with Nvidia/OpenAI/... is bogus after all if even OpenAI needs the White house support to survive. There is not enough demand".
Regardless of the specifics, if this sentiment spread enough (and it doesn't have to be the majority of investors) everyone, regardless of their beliefs, will start selling to avoid being the last one standing when the music stops.
We’re about to have 3 of the worlds’s largest corporations be massively in the red.
https://www.ft.com/content/a67248e7-f819-4dba-b0f7-3847df0a7...
At least that's my understanding of the current market dynamics regarding IPOS, if I'm wrong that would be great, and if someone else would explain it even better.
Even third world doesn't have this much shameless and corrupt regime as much as this one is.
Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.
I wouldn't, I'm not sure which nations are developing or that they're developing into. Aren't we all developing all the time?
> Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.
That's great, could you just explain the underlying reality without the loaded terms then?
But the US stock market of the last 4 years has shown it is grounded in hype far more than real value..
Also, it's better to double $2 instead of $1, and then pay back that $1.1 and end up with $2.9 instead of $2.
But it was a more facetious comment than I would have preferred to make, I actually went to delete it but you got in too quickly.
There are many reasons it's wrong, too, eg. at some level of risk debt becomes more expensive or impossible
But the intent of the comment was to say that if you owned as sure a thing as the GP proposed you'd do what you could to avoid selling parts of it.
scaling laws are a power law, you can only stay ahead for so long when each minor improvement gets exponentially more expensive
I understand that a lot of people want to cash out, but I'm surprised they're ready to share, especially given I don't think they've had issues bringing in funding in the private markets, but maybe I'm wrong.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/openai-de...
Both Altman and Dario have consistently said inference margins are high.
If you look at the way the dotcom bubble unfolded, dotcom didn't take off until after Netscape IPOed in 1995. The market had 5 more years of growth until the collapse. And even after collapse, the Nasdaq was 2x higher post pop than in 1995.
If history repeats itself, the stock market will take off after OpenAI and/or Anthropic IPOs. Be scared when random AI companies IPO with bad ideas and no revenue.
My posts on AI bubble over the years:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40739829
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385830
OpenAI is 10 years old. It has about 4500 employees. It's raised about $180B in capital, and has a valuation of roughly $900B on about $25B in revenue. Anthropic is 5 years old. It also has around 3000-5000 employees. It will have raised about $120-140B in capital, at a $900B valuation, on about $30-45B in revenue.
In the 80s and 90s companies IPO'd to actually raise growth capital - the public markets provided the money they needed to invest and expand, and then public investors reaped the benefits of their success, or paid the price of their failure. In the 2010s and 2020s companies grow with private capital, which has fewer strings attached, and then they unload the shares on the public market when they reach the top of their growth curve, leaving the public holding the bag.
There are definitely some dogs that IPOd and went straight down, but investing in the broad stock market has absolutely not been a bag holding experience in the past decade+
* big banks are trying to get out of their data center loan commitments, even selling that debt at a discount. From the article:
> According to the Financial Times, major lenders are already scrambling to offload pieces of massive data center loans through private transactions, risk transfers and synthetic structures. The reason is simple. AI infrastructure borrowing is reaching sizes that are beginning to choke the arteries of the financial system itself.
* there are real questions about long-term liquidity and capital capacity across the entire VC ecosystem. Ed Zitron estimates that the available capital for all technology VC funds will be fully exhausted within roughly two years if current spending levels hold steady. More money has been spent on AI in the last decade than the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Space Program and the US highway system combined[1]
* short-term success of these new data centers coming online is heavily reliant on steady fuel prices since hooking up to the grid can take years and many burn diesel generators while waiting for grid access. If the war in Iran drags on, high fuel prices will continue to ratchet up the cost of data center operations.
* public sentiment around the economy was largely positive heading into the collapse, whereas we've been in fairly consistent state of economic uncertainty for years now. Affordability was not a topic of conversation back then and a majority of Americans are unhappy with the direction of the economy in 2026.
0: https://www.investing.com/analysis/the-ai-boom-is-starting-t...
1: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/visualising-ai-spen...
This isn't necessarily a sign that they don't believe in the data centre loans, it's more than banks are basically required to avoid concentrated risk, because of the regulations we (mostly correctly) imposed upon them post GFC.
Now, personally I'm not convinced there's enough demand for AI services that these datacentres make sense, but we'll see I guess.
Let me dig up the FT article I read about this.
Here's the article: https://www.ft.com/content/08aba5e4-5834-4e79-a48d-989a2c5ba...
And this quote:
> Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-.... https://www.ft.com/content/08aba5e4-5834-4e79-a48d-989a2c5ba...
> Investors expect more such moves as banks come up against risk limits that restrict their exposure to individual borrowers or sectors, and seek to free up balance sheet for more lending.
Apparently, there's not enough demand for the datacenters already operating, there's not enough energy to power all the computers the datacenter companies already brought, there's not enough people to build the datacenters already planned...
It's not clear if there's enough money available to go for those giant IPOs, and it's not clear if there's enough GDP available to cover for all the investment contracts out there. But inflation and deregulation can solve those ones.
All of that would make sense iff those companies did get something close to AGI. But they haven't, what they have is their bullshit machines and a bamboozled public repeating their lines.
Shouldn't we at least be a little bit scared already when shoe companies pivot to AI and their stock goes up ~750%?
"Be fearful when others are greedy" — Warren Buffett
If this isn't a greedy market, I don't know what is. Also what does it mean for the stock market to 'take off' when it's been doing ATHs for a while despite the geopolitical turmoil? Even /r/wallstreetbets has more sensible takes than this.
I would postpone on the very last minute, depending on what my competitors numbers say :-D
The hype will be a lot less if Anthropic IPOs first and beats OpenAI’s numbers.
Personally I hope they do, everyone knows OpenAI is absolutely hemorrhaging money they don't have. In a perfect world an IPO becomes the rip the bandaid off moment for the AI bubble and we can start adjusting the industry as a whole towards a more reasonable world where AI tooling in the market is valued by actual utility and sustainable revenue rather than hype-driven speculation.
we're all gonna hold the AI bag.
Anthropic or OpenAI IPOing is literally signing their own death certificate.
The valuation will go to zero as soon as they have to submit actual numbers instead of the salad of bullshit they usually serve investors.
My recollection is that retail investors end up losing in these situations. I'm personally staying away...feels too much like a grift, but I won't pretend I have some magical analysis to prove it.
How you go from 380 to 900 billions in a month, I am very curious? So now Anthropic is evaluated 900 billions! Journalism this days is worse than my kids social media channel. Totally, I believe you, go for it, is just one more zero bro. Everyone Brace for Impact.
Let´s do it also, Breaking News: HUGSTON in talks with investors now Evaluated at 1 Billion Euro.
Mythos Marketing.
So there's still hope that the bubble pops before the funds are poisoned.
https://www.etfstream.com/articles/spacex-to-ipo-on-nasdaq-a...
The market doesn't necessarily reward better products or (in this case) more intelligence.
If it did, I'd be a lot richer than many of the mainstream startups.
It does when the product being sold is sold based on how intelligent (and thus how capable) it is. Unfortunately with people intelligence is merely an imprecise proxy of capability or organisational productivity.
But I don't see their models being used that much through api for all the applications that are using api nowadays. Openai is the one with the easiest api to use and the more lax about it.
1. "Retail" does not have enough purchasing power to have all of these "bags" unloaded on to.
2. Institutions buy shares in public firms post-IPO all the time even when they're "unloading bags onto retail". Take Uber (random example) ~83% is owned by institutions.
3. General factual history of the stock market shows that you are incorrect. Successful companies that IPO and continue to do business still have quite a lot of room left to grow. What was Google's market capitalization at IPO? What is it now? Is it possible some early investors made higher multiples than the IPO -> May 20th valuation? Yea for sure. That doesn't mean that all the value was captured. It also doesn't take into account the early stage risk for investing. Is Google an "at this point IPO"? No, but the principle is the same.
It's also worth mentioning however that the number of IPOs is going down over time. You could maybe argue that the only ones that actually IPO are all the bags, but that seems like a stretch.
These cynical comments "IPOs are mainly for unloading bags on to retail" lack explanatory power and data.
Institutions merely owning a newly-IPO'd stock means nothing. They get access to shares at a reasonable price before opening while retail is buying at insane prices after open. See Figma as an example where institutional investors got it at $33/share and it ended the IPO day at $115/share with retail buying all the way up (including pops above that at like $127)
I thought it was common knowledge that IPOs are a way for insiders and early investors (not IPO flippers) to get a nice exit during the frenzy.
Probably not. Do you understand however that your comment does not make sense in the context of my comment?
> Institutions merely owning a newly-IPO'd stock means nothing. They get access to shares at a reasonable price before opening while retail is buying at insane prices after open. See Figma as an example where institutional investors got it at $33/share and it ended the IPO day at $115/share with retail buying all the way up (including pops above that at like $127)
It also doesn't mean nothing - you have to go and analyze any given stock to make these kinds of claims on a per-IPO/equity basis. You also are ignoring traders and trading algorithms run by... big institutions and trading firms, and you're not accounting for volume or accounting for post-IPO purchases nor breaking those down by segment. In other words, you're just making stuff up.
Earlier stage investors take risk and are rewarded for that. Most companies go bankrupt and folks lose their principal. For the companies that are successful yea some go bust after IPO - so what? Are you against public markets or something? That would at least be an interesting discussion.
Google IPO'd in 2004 and returned from what I'm reading about 6,500% after IPO (and this was in 2024, so the gains have gone up much higher since then) and all of that was the bags dumped on retail. If someone wants to dump their 6,500% return on me I'll take them up on that all day every day and twice on Sunday.
Being cynical is a recipe for poverty.
A wise man once said: "if you're given an opportunity to cut an amazing deal and you can't tell who's getting screwed, then it's probably you"
0: https://pestakeholder.org/news/trump-admin-bails-out-private...
What is absolutely true? I'm not sure specifically what you are referring to.
> Just look at how private equity is now getting access to public markets and retirement accounts[0].
Nobody forces you to reallocate your Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund or wherever you have your retirement assets into a new Apollo fund.
Secondarily, we should treat people like adults and allow them to make their own investment decisions.
2000 was exactly like this
Microslop and Oracle are already way down from their highs. Only Nvidia as the shovel seller still performs well.
People generally hate AI. The IPO price will be inflated and the stock will drop 10% on the first day, like many late stage IPOs in the 2000 bubble.
Friends and family like the Kushners will cash out. Trump might even suspend wars around the IPO date.
I'm going to guess $2.5 trillion which is about 2.5x their current valuation. I think the hype is going to be immense.
Did you invest in Tesla and now invest in Open AI because who cares about ethics if you can make money?
Anthropic has the obviously the better product and were seemingly ethically better until they burnt their developer goodwill and started accepting Musk infrastructure.
But does having a better product actually translate to making more money?
Should I just lay down and die because there's no good choice when it comes to investing in this product they market as killing off people's livelihoods?
According to what metrics does Anthropic have the better product?
I’m not nearly an expert at any level, but it seems to me the models themselves are converging on “good enough” for coding, with the real differentiator being the harness and tooling.
From a bystander and casual user perspective it all seems running as fast as it can to commoditization to me.
I’m certainly the dumb money here so won’t be investing short or long for any of these. But I do find it interesting!
Not to say you're wrong about commoditization. I don't think these companies will be able to raise their prices and keep them there to make enough money to keep building models like they've been doing.
No CAPTCHA, no DDoS on blogger, works where archive.md is blocked
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/openai-is-preparin...
For those who don't use Javascript and prefer text-only
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23F0Pt...
For example, something like
curl -Haccept: -Huser-agent: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23F0Pt/ \
|(echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134') > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm"Ok...after playing with every Safari option I figured it out. I have to enable the Desktop option for other websites to ON. seems like the website does not open in mobile mode on my IPad."
https://old.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/12j907w/anyone_else_h...