Right now we have a ~$1 trillion company which a ton of the “economy” and valuations are based on, with near zero information on how it’s doing.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/openai-targets-3...
And yes, they will be acquired by a company which will have survived the next crash at a fraction of their currently estimated valuation and we will truly have the next ride of the economy .. many years ahead if 2001 is an example.
My anuallized revenue is about 4.5M. I just need now to get a salary every day.
> based on information that was provided to investors.
It was OpenAI spreading their bullshit annualized revenue.
OpenAI and Anthropic always play this silly game to pretend they are in anyway viable. It is always ARR, "adjusted" revenue, etc. "We are profitable when we pretend we don't have expenses".
Anyway, if I had a hundred bucks to burn, I’d bet this is a move to undermine Anthropic’s IPO.
I think the fact that we have so little information is the most important information we have. If OpenAI had a sound business plan and was on strong financial footing, they'd have IPO'd.
All of this continued stalling and obfuscation can only mean one thing, IMO: OpenAI has no long-term viability and they're desperately hoping for some new breakthrough to reinvent their business model before the VC money faucets turn off for good.
no way it ever gives you a return like, say, the amazon IPO could've.
Losses are much more privatized staying private. Instead of hitting people's 401k or pension fund, this is mostly contained to a concentrated set of VC and PE investors, not large public markets.
This also coincides with a growing market for private credit and VC which certainly helps companies stay private for longer.
There's a good recent YouTube video about the shift in regulations that switched IPOs from being a way to raise money for growth to being a way to dump on retail investors:
virtuosarmo•1h ago
Apparently they overstated revenue in an attempt to try to provide a direct comparison with Anthropic's reported metrics.
From the article: "According to a person with knowledge of the matter, the discrepancy arose from attempts by OpenAI’s own investors to produce a direct comparison with Anthropic’s annualised revenues. The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not. Efforts to “gross up” OpenAI’s annualised revenue led to reports that the group’s annualised revenue had hit $40bn in August. The company has since told investors its revenues have grown more than 70 per cent, leading to the $70bn figure"
TrainedMonkey•41m ago
tonfa•35m ago
Just to clarify from my understanding of the quote, "they" here is openai investors, not openai.
mmooss•29m ago
You can still learn something from it: Look at what they do, not what they say - look at how sophisticated their public communication is. They deliver that information in the perfect manner - not only the redirection and striking a blow against their rival, but they use an anonymous "person with knowledge of the matter": A named source at OpenAI might betray the self-interest in the statement, but some anonymous third party is just reporting what they know.
These guys are very good at it, though that shouldn't surprise you. Look at their product, in one sense a highly effective disinformation machine.
glitchc•27m ago
I'm confident both companies are lying about their revenues.
cactusplant7374•17m ago