OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/openai-investors-question-852-billion-valuation-strategy-shifts-ft-reports-2026-04-14/

by abdelhousni • 3 months ago

118 135 3 months ago

reuters.com

fraywing2• 3 months ago

What happens if OpenAI collapses at this point? Is it just too big to fail given defense contracts and Microsoft?

The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively.

Anyone seeing differently?

Invictus0• 3 months ago

too big to fail

genuine question, what do you think these words mean?

jedberg• 3 months ago

I think it's code for "the government will have to bail them out".

the__alchemist• 3 months ago

Anyone seeing differently?

There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude.

Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.

post-it• 3 months ago

What the hell kind of queries are you running? I use Claude Pro all the time for asking questions, doing data analysis, writing side projects, and I very rarely get rate limited.

I use Claude Max 20x at work and I rarely hit 10% session utilization, which implies even using Claude to write code all day only uses 2x the Pro token limit.

Are you just telling it to try again when you get a response you don't like?

StilesCrisis• 3 months ago

That's crazy talk. I am on the $20 plan and I do hit the limit occasionally, but I get a few hours of usage before I do.

taurath2• 3 months ago

Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting

Utterly not my experience. I use opus near daily for long research sessions (not all agent based). Are you throwing in 100k input tokens to every query?

leonidasv• 3 months ago

My 2 cents: Claude is more expensive, but it has something that Codex/GPT lacks that's not easy to quantify. Opus is probably a bigger model (my guess) and trained on code and technical writing (books?) of better qualify compared to GPT.

HOWEVER, it has a flaw that makes some people prefer Codex: out of the box, it's lazy: https://x.com/i/status/2044126543287300248

However, once you learn how to deal with the laziness (which can be dealt with some CLAUDE.md instructions and context docs), Claude shows a better taste for coding. It replicates patterns from the repo, writes more readable/maintainable code, follows instructions, captures implicit information.

GPT/Codex is not a bad model/agent, but it lacks something. It's amazing for code reviews, but it writes code with zero regard to your existing codebase or SOLID/DRY principles. It just likes to output code (a lot of it) that works for the task you gave it right now, with zero regard for maintenance later. And also over-uses defensive programming in a way that quickly makes the codebase unreadable for dynamic languages.

Claude is not perfect, I still have to steer it sometimes to prevent overengineering or duplicate code, but a lot less than when I try Codex (and the built-in /simplify does half of the work for me).

kamaal• 3 months ago

>Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query.

The free version is pretty much unusable. Not a single query completes, You get only one query every 4 hours, given like 12 waking hours, you get 3 queries, none of which complete.

$20 plan gets you only a small distance from there.

Looks like the focus is entirely on Enterprise customers these days. They don't even bother with their regular users these days. CC is entirely a enterprise product.

codetiger• 3 months ago

Seeing the same, Claude with every engineer. Even some non technical people moved to Claude from ChatGPT recently.

liveoneggs• 3 months ago

Nothing of note would happen if OpenAI collapsed. The same prompts will work with claude or gemini and the outputs will be good enough.

I've also noted that 90% of technical users I encounter are on claude or mostly-claude via cursor (switching models here-and-there).

parsimo2010• 3 months ago

Claude Code definitely has a head start, but there have been a few HN posts about a perceived nerfing of the intelligence and settings in the past month or so. Codex could capitalize on that weakness. They just introduced a $100 monthly 5x plan so they are at parity with the Claude Code plans. If Anthropic fiddles too much more with the settings then people will start to switch to Codex.

thefounder4• 3 months ago

Codex is just better than Claude but Claude is faster and has the better UI for vscode. That’s why I use Claude as main coder with codex(5.4 with xhigh effort) as mcp reviewer etc. It is clear to me that codex is a better programmer but the UI and speed are too much of a con to use it exclusively. Claude is just clumsy

nico• 3 months ago

At work there’s only codex right now (no approval yet for anthropic - OpenAI access was easier/faster through Microsoft)

It was a pretty straightforward transition going from mostly using claude code, to now exclusively codex

thefounder4• 3 months ago

The world would barely notice if both OpenAI and Anthropic “fail”. There is a lot of competition in this space

nijave2• 3 months ago

All our engineers use Claude but all the AI features in our app are built on OpenAI models

whateveracct3• 3 months ago

and claude is actually meh too!

hattmall4• 3 months ago

The amount of peripheral growth around it is even larger, tons of construction, utility company upgrades etc. There are more data centers under construction than there are currently operational data centers. So there is more than doubling of capacity coming from current buildout. If you include projects in the planning phase it is something like 4-6x expected capacity increase. The utility infrastructure buildout to meet this demand is equally huge.

The warning signs are already starting to show up though, projects are being stalled, not filled out, blaming it on delays from China etc, but the funding is still present, the construction keeps going on of the next building even as the last one sits vacant and offline. The sky high purchases of property from connected individuals by site developers continue, even as pushback mounts and many places are passing anti-datacenter ordinances.

gradus_ad• 3 months ago

Claude Code is extremely easy to set up and use. I suspect its saturation among software professionals is at the majority of the addressable market.

What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.

The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.

echelon4• 3 months ago

Missing the Claude Code market was the biggest swing and miss ever.

Too busy trying to make TikTok for preteens with $4/generation videos that lost their novelty the minute IP was off the table. Didn't even identify the professional market in video was the correct place to invest, like Kling and ByteDance did.

Chasing consumer killed their ascendency.

Sam is a ruthless leader and knows how to build an empire, but he's also a distracted leader who chases too many flights of fancy. Without a golden goose like Zuckerberg, every mistake is a knife wound.

vwvcxv4• 3 months ago

They get exactly what they deserve imo.

Its pretty embarassing how they have blown the lead. Instead of finding a pathway toward selling tokens in volume (software production) they spread themselves thin and tried to hype up research, sora, web browser... blah blah.

Again - they get what they deserve.

Leynos• 3 months ago

It amazed me that no one picked up on Codex last summer when it was effectively unlimited. I must have burnt through £10k worth of inference whilst still paying £20 a month

bickfordb• 3 months ago

What evidence is there that he knows how to build an empire outside of fundraising?

TheDong• 3 months ago

What about "cowork", aiming to be the claude code of excel files and pdfs and screenshotting your desktop to tell you what's wrong?

Like, that feels like it's also a huge amount of token churn ("sure, I can search every xls file on your machine to find the 2023 invoice from that company"), and very early in its adaption curve.

Most people are still using AI as a webpage chatbot to ask questions to and copy+paste between, but running an "openclaw" like assistant, which can access your files, email, and opens you up to wild security attacks, that seems like a really big killer app.

Cowork to me also seems like it'll take longer to reach the broader market since the models are less good at "use the mouse and keyboard to do this repetitive task" than "write code", but I see it as having killer-app potential with lots of token churn.

stingraycharles• 3 months ago

What about "cowork", aiming to be the claude code of excel files and pdfs and screenshotting your desktop to tell you what's wrong?

I’ve been using these types of functions for a while for some specific use cases, and it’s super useful for this. Eg go into my budgeting app and explain to me why a certain discrepancy between forecast and actual occurred, which would otherwise cost me a huge amount of time.

I’ve also been using Cowriter AI, which actively learns from what you’re doing by taking screenshots of your screen every few seconds.

These types of utilities are just starting, they’re underexplored, and will definitely burn lots of tokens (while creating value).

dagamer34• 3 months ago

I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplified and automated.

Spooky232• 3 months ago

Cowork is a dead end. Most people can’t operate onedrive.

Tools like Claude are best at answering things when the user understands the question.

majormajor2• 3 months ago

"Push buttons for me" in the most common ways I see it used ("add this ticket to Jira so I don't have to") is a nice timesaver for being lazy but it's not a 10x multiplier to justify the subscribe-forever cost.

I think it's more likely that the companies that employ large numbers of people to perform manual push-the-button-then-the-other-button workflows will replace the tools that need button-pushing with other sorts of automation.

And outside of work I wouldn't spend any money on something to save myself the ten minutes of logging in to pay my credit cards or check my bank statements once a month or so. I have no real need for an always-running assistant and even the things that it seems most useful for today (beating unassisted humans to the punch for limited-quantity things) are only something it could help with as long as only a very few people have access.

jasomill• 3 months ago

An AI that consumes every document on the system in response to a simple search request is going to be fired just as quickly as a human who does the same thing not long after replacements able to use conventional search tools to efficiently accomplish the same task are widely available.

Similarly, customers who rely on AI cowork tools will come to favor systems and applications that expose AI-friendly interfaces, which shouldn't be difficult to implement in most cases under the assumption that the models in question are already good at consuming API documentation and writing code (and, for that matter, writing API documentation, refactoring, and generating relatively straightforward wrapper code).

I have less faith in the market's ability to effectively respond to security threats in a timely fashion, alas.

groceryheist• 3 months ago

Claude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive, where its use increases demand for itself, at least in the supply / demand range for code we are accustomed to. It makes making software so much easier that Claude coding custom software becomes a solution to all sorts of past annoyances. Maintaining the software is easy enough thanks to Claude code.

echelon4• 3 months ago

Claude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive,

I'm in the film and engineering spaces, and I can honestly say the same about image and video models.

There is so much fun in all of these tools, and the productivity gains are insane.

I shoot film, but I never would have been able to do anything like this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDdsKJl92H4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U

Today, I saw AI OR DIE with this banger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbmoVdirxw

Gossip Goblin is doing incredible work as usual. Dude is a savant and would have killed it in Hollywood if he'd had a chance before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rzl7nUdEs4

Corridor Crew is leaning in and building new tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Dfw969itU

There's just so much incredible stuff being made by really brilliant people that never would have had the chance before. And these tools are literally brand spanking new. We're just getting started.

bostik• 3 months ago

I have now witnessed first hand what the unexpected benefits might be. I expected CC to be a boon to overburdened teams, because it's now possible to spend $2 on compute and have it write a mostly-one-off tool that nobody would ever otherwise have the capacity or time for.

Sure, that's happening too, but to a lesser degree than I thought. CC with a number of "enterprise integrations" (really: corporate MCPs) is a pretty hefty force-multiplier for operations teams. "Go summarise and dissect this weird client request for me. Documentation is spread across at least $THESE_ENTERPRISE_DATA_SILOES." Saves a bunch of time pinging the different people across continents who happen to know intimate details. That was not entirely unexpected.

It's the technically minded but not necessarily otherwise technical people who keep surprising me in weird and wacky ways. People are building themselves and their immediate peers disposable dashboards. Who needs a service to pull data for a real-time display when CC can collect the necessary information and construct a local, static HTML file with all the info neatly in one place? I'm sure there will be a hangover because the compute cost for doing these in JIT fashion will surely feel like death by a thousand cuts at some point, but the ability to really quickly validate whether certain types of data aggregations are useful is proving to be ... a positive development.

I disagree about the ease of maintaining the software, though. You still need the skills to really understand what the code is doing, and with the original "why" possibly lost in the adrenaline haze, the maintenance effort floor has shifted.

teaearlgraycold• 3 months ago

HN is a bubble. I hear people from outside of Silicon Valley that only just started trying out Claude Code recently. There's still a ton of developers yet to jump on board.

_3u10• 3 months ago

CC kinda sucks compared to opencode & kimi / minimax. It’s slow and annoying and the UI is subpar.

timmmmmmay• 3 months ago

it's been pretty funny seeing people who did not predict Claude Code's success and previously said the whole sector was a nonsense dead end now saying, well okay there's one massively successful killer app, but what if that's the only one ever?

majormajor2• 3 months ago

The scrutiny is because the actions of the company suggest that the company itself has no idea what another killer app could be. Let alone enough to reach a 1T valuation.

jcgrillo• 3 months ago

The whole sector is still quite likely a nonsense dead end.

Gagarin19172• 3 months ago

It’s the second killer app. The first was AI Chat. It was genuinely game changing and still is.

utopiah2• 3 months ago

Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.

Are they actually driving any profit? I mean actual profit, not "tokens" or users or profit but ignoring inference costs, same ignoring training, R&D, etc. I'm not arguing against how useful it is, nor how popular, just the basic total spent - total earned.

operatingthetan• 3 months ago

Us devs have shiny object syndrome. We will use whatever we perceive to be be best at the moment and move on. People are already souring on Opus 4.6 due to what appears to be opaque changes to it by Anthropic. For any of these companies to be successful they need to get to a point where their models stop growing and compute gets multiples cheaper.

torginus2• 3 months ago

What is incredibly disgusting for me, is the idea that there can be only one winner in the stock market, which spits in he face of free market competition.

This is not an AI thing, this is a stocks thing, which Ive been complaining about incessantly.

If a given domain, like AI, has competition, that means you have to sell things at cost + margin, and rush ahead or be crushed by competitors. Will definitely make you good money, but wont make you a king.

This is not the kind of money people involved with these kinds of companies are looking for.

AI right now looks like a competiton, with many horses in the race, which are more or less building the same product.

It will hard to squeeze and enshittify this considering people can just jump to another vendor, thus if the current market structure were to prevail, investors would go.

Thus competition has to go.

Altman knows this, and tried to position OpenAI as the obvious winner in this competition, but I guess in the process he managed to alienate people, so now he's not doing so well.

But who knows what the future will bring?

tim333• 3 months ago

I don't think it's true there can only be one winner. Lots of industries have multiple successful large companies.

SpicyLemonZest2• 3 months ago

"You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" an early backer of OpenAI told FT. "It's a deeply unfocused company."

This is exactly the dynamic I've been worried about.

If you go to OpenAI's site to learn what they're all about, they're pretty clear about it: "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity", "Join us in shaping the future of technology". They think and I agree that ChatGPT is great, but the future of humanity does not depend on precisely how successful this one consumer chatbot is, and so it is not the company's focus. Anyone who understands OpenAI at even a basic level would recognize this, it's neither new nor subtle.

I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that OpenAI investors do not understand OpenAI and are just revenue growth junkies.

vwvcxv4• 3 months ago

OAI has zero focus. How many acquisitions (value destructive it seems) and projects have they killed?

Whats comical is Steve Jobs preached the notion of focus decades ago.

Why can't people follow simple advice from someone who already acquired the scar tissue? Its literally madness.

Sam shouldve been fired and stayed fired. He's great at raising money, but running the firm? Absolute basket case of a CEO in that regard.

semiquaver• 3 months ago

They’re investors. More or less by definition they only care about revenue growth.

taurath2• 3 months ago

ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity

Thus far based on their actions, a reasonable read would be that they believe “humanity” would be better off with fewer people. Whoever you think OpenAI is or was, you’d have to be willfully ignorant of the actions of those who run it to believe it and Sam now.

cal_dent• 3 months ago

just maths. if they're as a capable as each other then x product cannot be worth multiples above y unless there's a clear USP. Arguably OpenAi's is brand recognition but given Antrhopic's recent growth that's less certain than a quarter ago

Avicebron• 3 months ago

I was convinced they were going to go the openclaw or something similar route..pivoting into cybersec/enterprise makes sense if they are trying to copy anthropic, but it doesn't really telegraph any sort of differentiator

vwvcxv4• 3 months ago

its telegraphing that they have no vision

qudat• 3 months ago

This is the key. These frontier model companies are funneling all of their time and resources into scaling, how could they possibly be researching the next phase of AI? Once scaling hits the limit the money is gonna dry up.

AGI is not gonna come from these companies

hooch• 3 months ago

For some reason the latest Claude Desktop release from Anthropic threw off its Claude branding and charm to chase after bland Codex Desktop app look and feels.

Maybe they think OpenAI is doing something right?

matchagaucho4• 3 months ago

As someone working in the enterprise space with OAI, this still feels like we're in the top of the first inning.

Many teams remain anchored on equating AI with chat experiences, while a growing share of enterprise value is emerging from leasing compute clusters to run agentic workloads in containerized environments.

OpenAI has built a cloud-first architecture that supports this model. The desktop experience and applications are sexy, but enterprise usage will likely skew heavily toward asynchronous, background processing.

mandevil4• 3 months ago

I know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet.

Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very quickly. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. Apple IPO'd in 1980 with a 21% operating margin! Netscape Navigator 1.0 released December 15th 1994, Amazon.com made its first sale July 16th 1995- 214 days later. AMZN IPO'd May 15th 1997, 883 days after Netscape 1.0 released to the public (they had raised <10 million dollars to that point, but chose not to have a profit because they kept re-investing all of their profit into expanding the business).

We are already 1232 days since ChatGPT 1.0. So we're about 50% farther along than either of those killer apps. No one has figured out as good a business model for Generative AI as either of those were.

To use the other great technology transformation of the past 50 years, cell phones, I have a bit of trouble figuring out the right comparison to ChatGPT 1.0. I can work backwards from today to ChatGPT 1.0 opening up to the public, that's about the difference from the iPhone 3G (the first one with an appstore, the real killer app) to the launch of the Motorola Razr, to give you an idea of how fast mobile technology moved.

Do note that the Razr and the iPhone, like Visicalc, the Apple II, and Netscape 1.0 were hugely profitable for their companies, in a way that no one has demonstrated with Generative AI. Amazon is a bit of a special case, but they were not raising money, they were just re-investing cash that was being thrown off not as profits but into expanding the business. I don't believe that any AI company is generating cashflow the way that Amazon was in 1997, and the other companies mentioned here were GAAP-profitable.

grtteee5• 3 months ago

Most people don’t want to accept and believe that the only viable revenue stream is selling tokens in relation to software development.

All the other stuff is nice… but you will continue to be money losing and eventually die.

Now you can’t come out and say this because there’s a whole bunch of investments that depend on hype - think about the robotics nonsense.

nl2• 3 months ago

I think that fact that IPOs have grown slower over the years is more about larger VC markets where they can fund valuations up to hundreds of billions rather than something to do with adoption.

As you note, Netscape and Amazon IPOed fairly quickly.

Google took 6 years (1998 to 2004)

Facebook took 8 years (2004 to 2012)

Alibaba Group took 15 years (1999 to 2014)

Claude Code is at $30B annual recurring revenue, and it launched in Feb 2025, and OpenAI at $25B (although they measure partner revenue differently). By comparison the iPhone make $630M revenue in the 12 months after it was launched.

matchagaucho4• 3 months ago

"previous killer apps" - exactly. That's the point. Everyone is anchored in AI as being the next desktop app. It's not.

We're only using 1% of what these models will ultimately do when they're running 24/7 as utilities serving new economic models.

There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.

prescriptivist3• 3 months ago

Comparing the IPO market today to the IPO market in the late 90s is not very instructive. You could have IPO'd a lemonade stand in 1998 and raised $10 million.

impulser_4• 3 months ago

"You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?"

The ironic part about this is GPT models are by far the worst models to chat too.

I think I rather talk to a wall than GPT-5.4. It so unpleasant. I feel bad for anyone who only experience with AI is ChatGPT.

thefounder4• 3 months ago

what makes gpt 5.4 bad to chat ? To me it seems smart and does the job albeit it’s a bit slow. I’m using it only/mostly with the “pro” /xhigh reasoning

strongpigeon3• 3 months ago

I think it’s the default system prompts of ChatGPT. I do think it’s better with the “Professional” tone with “Less Emoji” but that’s just me.

blanched• 3 months ago

In my experience, within one reply ChatGPT (compared to Claude) tends to:

* generate a lot of text

* answer at least a few of what it thinks might be follow up questions

* restate its original answer a few times

* suggest a follow up “if you want, I can turn that into…”

It feels very tedious and noisy.

impulser_4• 3 months ago

The way it converses is the least human like out of all models. It communicates like its writing markdown documents instead of just conversing normally like every other model does. You ask a question and it spits out a design doc instead of just answering the question like a normal human would.

birdfood• 3 months ago

There’s roughly 8b people in the world and somewhere between 2-3b have never used the internet. If OpenAI manages to capture the 6b internet users growing at 100% per year, they have 3 years of user growth left max. Then what?

impulser_4• 3 months ago

They do what Facebook and Google did. Ads.

dyauspitr3• 3 months ago

I completely disagree. I like the responses from ChatGPT, Gemini just seems off and I feel like I can’t get what I want from it.

rvz• 3 months ago

So now they are realizing that they are indeed in a bubble and OpenAI was extremely overvalued?

Anthropic is also overvalued. Their revenue is not even recurring. It’s now “Annualised Revenue” due to token spend.

These two companies are just vehicles of a pump and dump scheme. OpenAI is already off loading shares with “acquisitions” that do not make any sense because investors already think they are about to IPO and not worth the price.

Also, one more thing… and it is called Deepseek.

jmye2• 3 months ago

It’s an absolutely hilarious/absurd valuation for a company that has absolutely no path to do anything other than lighting money on fire, forever. I’d call it nonsense, but Tesla’s valuation proves the market runs on shenanigans, at this point, so whatever.

If people want to meme OpenAI into a trillion dollar market cap, I guess let them?

drivebyhooting• 3 months ago

Let them. And have pension funds and 401Ks automatically go for the ride too.

jmye2• 3 months ago

shrug Sue the fund managers investing in dumb memes, and the HR people who picked those benefit plans. Not sure what you’d propose, instead - they don’t have to directly tell anyone they know they’ll never turn a profit, yet.

NewsaHackO• 3 months ago

Ah yes, the weekly "ChatGPT is definitely going to fail, for real!" post, with absolutely no substance whatsoever. Still, they know it will definitely be on the front page, regardless. Make sure you subscribe to their pub!

jesterson• 3 months ago

To be fair, your comment doesn't have much substance as well

jmyeet• 3 months ago

I don't believe that either Anthropic or OpenAI are going to survive the AI valuation crunch. Google, Meta and Microsoft will because they're not AI-only companies. There are four reasons why I believe this:

1. I honestly don't think that AI is all that useful for anything other than suppressing labor costs and I don't expect that to change in the short to medium term;

2. I really don't think Anthropic or OpenAI can ever satisfy their stratospheric valuations. I foreesee no cash flow possible that will arrive quick enough to make that happen;

3. Hardware costs will devalue the trillions invested in AI data centers. By 2030 the GPUs will probably be at least 3x as good. Bear in mind, it's just over 4 years between the 3090 and 5090 and that's 3x TFLOPS; and

4. China or other actors will make sure that proprietary LLMs won't be dominant. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow. China in particularly won't want a US tech company to dominate this space. The increasing RAM in local, relatively cheap computers will make this more and more viable.

Bonus prediction: I think China will be making their own homegrown NVidia equivalent GPUs on homegrown EUV by 2030.

kushalpandya• 3 months ago

The duopoly slowly turning into a monopoly won't be pretty.

nickvec• 3 months ago

I suspect that Google is working on improving their models for coding behind the scenes. Hopefully they release something soon to compete with Codex and CC. To be candid, I use CC, but have not tried out Codex.

strongpigeon3• 3 months ago

I’ve tried them all and have come to slightly prefer Codex (with CC close second).

Google has the benefit of being insanely profitable though.

asim• 3 months ago

Nothing is worth $852B in that space of time unless they are printing more than half of that in cash which to be clear they are not. They are burning it at that rate. Let's be clear. It's a valuable company, a valuable product, a valuable technology. It set the trend for the next phase of computer usage. But it's not worth $852B in that span of time and when it goes public that reality will bear down on them quickly.

It's a falling knife. Don't try catch it on the way down. That valuation might be justified in another 10 years.

kikokikokiko• 3 months ago

Falling knife or not, if you own an index fund, or if your 401k owns one, you're buying a piece of it at IPO prices. The exit scam is almost complete.

nofriend• 3 months ago

Index funds won't get in at ipo prices. They wait a year or so before including new stocks, so the price is guaranteed to have settled by then. OpenAI also isn't profitable yet so that's another point against them in terms of being included in index funds.

utopiah2• 3 months ago

justified in another 10 years.

Hard to imagine when they don't have any moat.

Sure they have ... I don't know how many users but it's not like a social network. Instagram was valued $10B with 10 very VERY fast not because of it's tech or employees but mostly IMHO because of the number of locked in users ... because of OTHER users.

Here if one wants to move from OpenAI to Anthropic, they can and they do. You might have difficulty exporting history, context, etc but you make it.

Even basic email has more lock-in than any of the model provider. They did have some moat few years ago, arguably, but now no differentiator that would justify such a valuation.

They are no Meta/Google/Microsoft/Oracle not because of their size or technology but only because their customers can swap providers.

shalmanese• 3 months ago

Even basic email has more lock-in than any of the model provider.

History has proven the average person has very little ability to discern which products have lock-in.

Everyone was confidently predicting Uber would dominate over all the regional ride sharing apps because ride sharing is a commodity and subsidies were enough to shift user behavior.

The thesis from AI providers about lockin have always been coherent: increased personalization and learning of workflows over time would increasingly make using a new AI much worse than an AI that already knows you. If you look at the human virtual assistant world, stickiness is incredibly high once are happy with your onboarded assistant because onboarding a new person unavoidably sucks.

Is this thesis correct? We don’t know, it took Uber billions of burnt cash to discover their thesis was incorrect.

habosa• 3 months ago

There does seem to be like a 1% chance (maybe 0.5%) that this turns into a WeWork situation. It's a product that users love, but the company leadership is so used to lying and deceiving and being loose with numbers that the IPO filing could be a pretty big shock. Either they'll have to tell the truth, which will be much less rosy than the lies, or they'll lie and turn everyone off.

Probably won't happen. But not definitely.

OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

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