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.
Good times.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The differentiating factor will be access to proprietary training data. Everyone can scrape the public web and use that to train an LLM. The frontier companies are spending a fortune to buy exclusive licenses to private data sources, and even hiring expert humans specifically to create new training data on priority topics.
s/breathing/investment/g s/balloon/bubble/g s/air/money/g
(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.
Very interesting, I will follow it closely, mostly to see how you ROI 110 Billions in a couple of years.
maplethorpe•1h ago
Incredible.
konschubert•1h ago
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•1h ago
sixQuarks•1h ago
zozbot234•1h ago
iancmceachern•1h ago
eviks•1h ago
SpicyLemonZest•1h ago
I don't think that's my relationship with AI, I'm hardly an uncritical booster. But would I know if it was?
albedoa•1h ago
outside1234•1h ago
https://fortune.com/2026/02/26/tesla-robotaxis-4x-8x-worse-t...
konschubert•55m ago
general_reveal•1h ago
World will still need software, lots of it. Their valuation is based on an entire developer-less future world (no labor costs).
wongarsu•1h ago
What is somewhat justifying OpenAI's valuation is that they are still trying for AGI. They are not just working on models that work here and now, they are still approaching "simulating worlds" from all kinds of angles (vision, image generation, video generation, world generation), presumably in hopes that this will at some point coalesce in a model with much better understanding of our world and its agency in it. If this comes to pass OpenAI's value is near unlimited. If it doesn't, its value is at best half what it is today
zozbot234•1h ago
SpicyLemonZest•1h ago
wongarsu•52m ago
Yes, this is kind of like Tesla promising full self driving in 2016
rvz•1h ago
"AGI" is the IPO.
whizzter•1h ago
And that's the dealbreaker for me since they've been so adamant on scaling taking them there, while we're all seeing how it's been diminishing returns for a while.
I was worried a few years back with the overwhelming buzz, but my 2017 blogpost is still holding strong. To be fair it did point to ASI where valuation is indeed unlimited, but nowadays the definition of AGI is quite weakened in comparison.. but does that then convey an unlimited valuation?
lenerdenator•53m ago
How?
If we have AGI, we have a scenario where human knowledge-based value creation as we know it is suddenly worthless. It's not a stretch to imagine that human labor-based value creation wouldn't be far behind. Altman himself has said that it would break capitalism.
This isn't a value proposition for a business, it's an end of value proposition for society. The only people who find real value in that are people who spend far too much time online doing things like arguing about Roko's Basilisk - which is just Pascal's Wager with GPUs - and people who are so wealthy that they've been disconnected with real-world consequences.
The only reason anyone sees value in this is because the second group of people think it'll serve their self-concept as the best and brightest humanity has ever had to offer. They're confusing ego with ability to create economic value.
zozbot234•46m ago
zozbot234•1h ago
outside1234•1h ago
konschubert•58m ago
a) AI is going to replace a Bazillion-Dollar Industry and that
b) being an AI model provider does not allow to capture margins above 5% long-term
I am not saying that this is what will happen, but it's a plausible scenario. Without farmers we would all be dead but that does not mean the they capture monopoly rents on their assets.
RobotToaster•1h ago
stavros•1h ago
baal80spam•1h ago
zozbot234•1h ago
stavros•1h ago
boringg•1h ago
uluyol•1h ago
lm28469•1h ago
outside1234•1h ago