https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550465
This comment is just great, starting off with:
“To be honest I almost think the numbers are irrelevant...”
Here’s another gem:
“My takeaway from this is that it's incredibly validating as a business model. Inference is _highly_ profitable...”
Thanks for the laughs. It’s a small compensation for the immense damage you’ve all done to the industry and more importantly the economy (which you will deny until the very end of the cycle like the cowards and frauds that you are).
You know, Ed actually did Scam a favor by leaking those numbers and saving him the embarrassment of filing an S1 (something Wario still hasn’t gotten up the nerve to do yet by the way).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ed+zitron+bubbl...
[2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-cfo-news
> It's clear that both OpenAI and Anthropic are rushing toward a public offering so that their CEOs can cash out, and that their underlying economics are equal parts problematic and worrying.
He’s not shorting the market or calling a top. He’s saying that the bubble will pop because the underlying business model is and always will have a NEGATIVE ROI. Unless you’re speculating on semiconductor stocks the difference is irrelevant.
Do me a favor and tell me how much of the 1,000,000,000,000 spent / committed to a datacenter buildout has been returned to shareholders / creditors?
2. he has tried over and over again to predict the bubble and peak [1] [2] [3]
3. that OpenAI is filing for an IPO next year is no vindication of Ed's claim when he specifically predicted the opposite (as I showed in the above comment)
4. OpenAI filing for an IPO next year has no bearing on its fundamentals
5. on Datacenters: Anthropic had to lease it from Elon's datacenter because they were too short on capacity and every one was complaining that their limits were too low
[1] Ed on 2024, "threaten to begin a collapse that I’ve been predicting since March" https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
[2] Ed on 2024, "three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes" https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/
[3] Ed on 2024, "things are beginning to collapse" https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/
Edit: the quality of discussion in this website is annoying sometimes.get downvoted for good faith discussion
SpaceX's stock volatile? It's a shame nobody saw that coming.
Surely if your company isn't just blowing smoke then you have nothing to worry about. Or is this an admission that the insane valuation for these companies is currently just bullshit?
Not really. Plenty of solid companies have to wring their hands around IPO timing based on market conditions. Sometimes, this is due to valuation multiples. Sometimes it's due to fads, e.g. investors preferring capital-structure efficiency versus low leverage.
When was the last time someone seriously asked if OpenAI was going to go public before Anthropic? For me, it's been at least months, maybe closer to a year. The corporate-governance complexity drove half of that, momentum the other half, and messaging from both companies having been consistent with that timeline for months sealed the deal.
The best option at this point is kick the can down the road and hope market sentiment improves next year. Not much signal that it will, and quite a lot of signal the sentiment only declines, but pumping the brakes is the least worst option on the table.
Unless Anthropic also cancels its IPO, this probably isn't it.
Open source is starting to slowly become a source of frustration for frontier labs In the discussion around value for money.
Ignore it and don't do this: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
There is zero evidence of any causal link between him and this. The obvious one, instead, is SpaceX's volatility.
> Do me a favor and tell me how much of the 1,000,000,000,000 spent / committed to a datacenter buildout has been returned to shareholders / investors?
If Anthropic also delays its IPO, you'll have a point.
Ed’s leaks demonstrated that OAI doesn’t make money (even on inference).
Put these two together and I think the conclusion is pretty obvious.
What? How? SpaceX loses oodles of money. It's trading above its IPO, and just filled an oversubscribed bond deal.
> Put these two together and I think the conclusion is pretty obvious
Zitron has a faithful following. He isn't a broadly-influential analyst.
They did not.
The Zitronites will say that the data is fraudulent, and OpenAI must have classified some of their inference as marketing, or R&D, or some other wacky theory of the week. But the actual data does not show that. It is made up.
If you want to cherry-pick the worst parts from the leak and disbelieve the more positive ones, it feels like you're not in a great place epistemically...
Which, look, could be true! But it's currently speculation only.
They don't. They show that OpenAI need to people to draw that conclusion.
They also show a marketing budget so large that it's almost completely implausible, which kind of makes you think — have a percentage of marketing-driven free plan tokens been hidden in there?
> OpenAI’s advisers presented company executives with the option of waiting until 2027 to go public with a $1 trillion valuation, or lower the targeted valuation for a quicker I.P.O. Mr. Altman, said one person in contact with him on the topic, responded that any change to the trillion-dollar valuation was a nonstarter.
I really don't know how to read this and reach any conclusion other than, OpenAI leadership won't accept what financial analysts consider to be a rational valuation of its stock.
Let me amend: it's a more-obvious cause given it's pertinent new information in a way Zitron partially leaking financials many institutional investors have already seen is not.
> don't know how to read this and reach any conclusion other than, OpenAI leadership won't accept what financial analysts consider to be a rational valuation of its stock
Neither did SpaceX and, as you say, it's trading above its IPO price and placing tens of billions of dollars of debt.
I think Zitron's analysis was on the balance good, though it didn't say a lot of what folks on here seem to have taken away (e.g., about OpenAI's inference being marginally unprofitable). It seems he's got a bit of a cult of personality around him, which makes me inherently sceptical. But it's a pretty ridiculous reach to claim OpenAI had to delay its IPO because of him versus the much-more visible and talked about thing.
How would there be? He's a blogger and a youtuber, they are a private company with secretive financials, bankers involved in pre-IPO work don't talk openly. Nobody is going to say "we only decided not to do this because of a youtuber" because that would make them look like the ill-informed, over-eager idiots they've been to let this nonsense get this far.
Why would there be any concrete evidence it was down to him specifically, and not, say, dozens of finance people saying "what the *fuck* is that marketing budget about — that's so large it looks like something's been hidden in it" after reading about it from him and the FT and everyone else who was involved.
“Rushing toward a public offering so that their CEOs can cash out” is not a prediction of a specific time to IPO, and is supported by OpenAI’s own public statement two months after that was published
> We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.
So... OpenAI has specifically said that they have not decided on the timing and it may be a while. And now we have news that they are waiting till next year.
What do you think is supported by whom? Being more clear and concrete helps the discussion.
Or sooner. It says sooner or later. It only means “later” if you don’t read the “sooner” part. Choosing to read selectively isn’t One Weird Trick To Own A Blogger. “This post about submitting a draft S1 to the SEC is proof that they don’t want to go public” lmao
I mean it’s pretty obvious that the pro AI as an industry wide replacement people think it is One Weird Trick. I’ve still yet to see any of them articulate how they are going to reach profitability without resorting to the meme of projecting that their baby has doubled size in 6 months so is projected to reach 10.5 trillion pounds by the age of 10.
As far as the bubble bursting soon, we are starting to see some pretty concerning signals. The South Korean stock market triggered trading circuit breakers twice earlier this week to stop a runaway selloff in the tech sector. For reference, circuit breakers have only been triggered in the Korean market 10 times in history, and only 5 times ever in the US markets.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/world-indices/articles/kos...
Take for example the action on SPACs that made the "SPAC everything" era end.
It’s such a fast paced and competitive industry, anyone who takes even a short break is going to have a hard time coming back from it, and that’s basically what they’ve done.
Otherwise people try other cheaper models, and they find out those models work perfectly for what they need.
Go ahead and incorporate that in those 3 variables... lets see what you know before I bother replying.
What are you basing this on? Both are currently doing rounds/tenders that are placing without problems.
The media treats these two differently, as do financial influencers. But I'd be careful about conflating either of them with the market.
Idk, I'm still sceptical how someone could look at the market right now and conclude that it's suddenly hyperaware of financial metrics.
For whatever reason–maybe it's corporate-structure complexity, maybe it's lawsuits–OpenAI was always at the end of the pack of AI IPOs. If SK Hynix take August and Anthropic September or October, that would mean a 2026 OpenAI IPO would have to (a) coincide with one of those or (b) go to market during an election/post-election fiasco and/or the holidays. The realistic options were July or October, the latter being between a likely Anthropic IPO and the midterms. The timing just doesn't make sense and maybe someone realise that.
babelfish•2h ago
typo
4k0hz•31m ago