OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-is-preparing-to-file-for-an-ipo-very-soon-0ec95af5

by louiereederson • 2 months ago

206 406 2 months ago

wsj.com

https://archive.md/0Ez3C

dbbk2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

rvz• 2 months ago

The "I" in "AGI" stands for IPO.

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?

glitchc• 2 months ago

Yup, Sam can claim that AGI is owned by everyone (he really means their pension funds though), while he makes a hasty exit to his private island retreat which we all have paid for.

IncreasePosts• 2 months ago

Sam is a power monster. He'd probably commit suicide before intentionally retiring and stepping away from influencing affairs.

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

Throughout the “AI bubble” talk in 2024 and 2025, I consistently argued that we were nowhere near the peak of the AI bubble. So far, that view has held up, as valuations are significantly higher today than they were in 2024 and 2025.

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

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035647

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241944

nostrademons2• 2 months ago

Companies IPO'd at an earlier stage of development in the days before Sarbanes-Oxley. Netscape was a 16-month-old startup when it IPO'd. It had about 250 employees. It had raised a total $27M in venture capital then, and then raised a few hundred million in the IPO itself, which gave it a total valuation of $2.9B. It had $16M in revenue and no earnings.

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.

ac29• 2 months ago

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+

CodingJeebus3• 2 months ago

I think we're a lot closer to the peak than when Netscape IPO'd relative to the dotcom bust for a few reasons:

* 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...

disgruntledphd23• 2 months ago

* big banks are trying to get out of their data center loan commitments, even selling that debt at a discount. From the article:

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.

rakel_rakel• 2 months ago

Be scared when random AI companies IPO with bad ideas and no revenue.

Shouldn't we at least be a little bit scared already when shoe companies pivot to AI and their stock goes up ~750%?

phatfish2• 2 months ago

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. If I was to guess, that shoe company nonsense is the dotcom IPO equivalent.

yCombLinks• 2 months ago

Eh, at the beginning of 1995 the Nasdaq PE ratio was about 17.5. The current Nasdaq PE bounces around 33. During the dotcom bubble that would be the early 1998 timeframe.

sph• 2 months ago

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.

"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.

cdrnsf3• 2 months ago

Can't wait to see those revenue numbers.

4lx87• 2 months ago

OpenAI reported ~$20 billion annualized revenue for 2025, up from $6 billion the year before.

cdrnsf3• 2 months ago

And that covers their model training and infrastructure costs?

jmye• 2 months ago

Agree, deeply interested in their books and then whatever report cadence we end up on next year.

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.

jddj5• 2 months ago

At one point (1.5 months ago) Bloomberg posted a piece saying the private market was apparently drying up for openai due to anthropic sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/openai-de...

Aboutplants2• 2 months ago

I’m less interested in revenue and more interested in their operational costs

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

I'm personally interested in their growth rate more than anything else. I'm not a believer that AI can't be profitable and has no moat narrative that is popular here.

Both Altman and Dario have consistently said inference margins are high.

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

Any early guesses on end of first day market cap?

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.

derwiki3• 2 months ago

I’d take the Kalshi bet for far less than 2.5tn

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

What do you think it will end up as?

Danox7• 2 months ago

500 billion..

nodesocket• 2 months ago

Smart move IPO'ing ahead of Anthropic. Can take a lot of AI capital being first mover... That is, until Anthropic IPO's which I expect shortly.

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

Agreed. They should IPO first if they think Anthropic’s IPO will be bigger. Get as much capital as you can first, then use it to buy more compute and defensively.

The hype will be a lot less if Anthropic IPOs first and beats OpenAI’s numbers.

cess11• 2 months ago

Well, I guess that's an effective way to deflect responsibility for the harms they cause from the people actually in control of their software and databases, onto 'shareholders'.

throw03172019• 2 months ago

Are they trying to beat SpaceX as well?

skiing_crawling• 2 months ago

At this point IPOs are mainly for unloading bags onto retail. Every institution who wanted a piece of these labs got in years ago and captured all the value.

cryo32• 2 months ago

Wise comment. 25 years working in PE showed me that retail investors are how you pay off losses.

ericmay4• 2 months ago

Well, sad to say this is simply untrue for a few reasons.

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.

hypeatei• 2 months ago

So I take it you're going to buy shares of OpenAI on opening day then? ;)

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.

CodingJeebus3• 2 months ago

It's absolutely true. Just look at how private equity is now getting access to public markets and retirement accounts[0]. You think PE is letting the little guys in out of the goodness of their hearts? No, they've extracted as much as they can and the market is starting to question the absurd valuation of private assets.

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...

danny_codes3• 2 months ago

Retail includes people holding passive index funds.

lofaszvanitt• 2 months ago

Yeah, and now the you shall not buy this bullshit begins. And then the price soars. :D

brcmthrowaway• 2 months ago

Congrats to OpenAI and RIP to the SF housing market

astkl• 2 months ago

It will probably be a failure, that is why they are rushing it to prevent a greater failure.

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.

amanaplanacanal7• 2 months ago

What war? We've been assured the war is over, and we already won! Multiple times...

bensyverson• 2 months ago

Let's hope—and I say this with zero sarcasm—that their relationship to Wall Street is cruel indifference.

Aboutplants2• 2 months ago

The summer of Trillion dollar IPO’s is upon us. OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX

Will they eat each others potential capital appetite? Or is there just that much laying around for them all to gobble up the bag?

davey48016• 2 months ago

It depends at least partially on how much they're going to float. I think SpaceX is only planning about a 4% float, so even at $1.5T they only need around $60B. Which is a drop in the bucket.

EDIT - but that's just the IPO, I wasn't even thinking about how much insiders will want to sell after the lockup ends...

ecommerceguy• 2 months ago

Is 100+ FPE the new normal?

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

I think one of them is not like the other.

I would invest in OpenAI or Anthropic or both but I doubt I'd invest in SpaceX.

RandallBrown• 2 months ago

Isn't SpaceX the only one of those that actually makes money?

Kye• 2 months ago

Say OpenAI IPO 5 times fast

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

I'll believe it when I see it.

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.

derwiki3• 2 months ago

Market can stay irrational longer than..

Danox7• 2 months ago

Both will probably drop like a rock after IPO and hang there for a year or two at the bottom similar to Figma if you are retail, there really is any point buying on IPO day just wait and buy all the shares you want at low price a year from now.

cute_boi• 2 months ago

[flagged]

iLoveOncall2• 2 months ago

Them filing will burst the bubble.

prh8• 2 months ago

Opportunity for all the big money to get something back out while they can, which collapses the whole thing

paol_taja• 2 months ago

The funniest possible outcome is OpenAI going public and then having to explain to shareholders that the path to AGI requires losing more money than previously expected, but with greater confidence.

amusingimpala752• 2 months ago

Are we not going to talk about the literal CFO saying their books aren’t up to rigorous reporting standards and need to wait until 2027?

tedd4u2• 2 months ago

Current investors know the hype is sufficient to not worry about all those niggling financial details and want liquidity now -- retail will buy them out.

myvoiceismypass• 2 months ago

You can get exposure to OpenAI now via the Robinhood Venture Fund I (RVI) if you so chose (that fund is up 170% since its inception earlier this year.)

avaer• 2 months ago

A race to lock in the money next to SpaceX (which just filed an S-1)? This can't go well.

chinathrow• 2 months ago

Maybe Sams reaction to Elons ego?

cm2187• 2 months ago

I am starting to speculate that was the purpose of the openai lawsuit. Delay IPO.

throwawaygmbno• 2 months ago

What is the advice from the internet?

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?

tehlike• 2 months ago

You can sit this one out. There are many other opportunities to make money in the market. Ai build out is currently in play, and many names are rising accordinglym

nradov2• 2 months ago

If you're invested in any index funds or most mutual funds (including through your retirement account) then you can't really sit this one out. We're all going along for the ride, hold on tight.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

Anthropic has the obviously the better product

According to what metrics does Anthropic have the better product?

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 months ago

Reported number of business users, although as with all these metrics I feel obligated to emphasize the caveat that most analysis of the AI labs' finances is speculative. OpenAI remains dominant in the consumer chatbot space, but that's so obviously going to be commoditized that I don't think it matters.

ant6n• 2 months ago

Tesla used to be a kind of “ethical” play. They made electric cars cool.

darkstar_162• 2 months ago

Tesla is still doing that. The CEO is a shithead but that's a different matter.

sandeepkd• 2 months ago

Looks like there is only limited money in the market and there is a race to get it first. Wonder if the free market concept should move the prices down in such a scenario?

nradov2• 2 months ago

Don't worry, the Fed can create infinite money!

miohtama• 2 months ago

It's good that there is now a new head of Fed for this.

aurareturn8• 2 months ago

I think it's because the private market can't possibly go any higher. OpenAI is already valued at around $1 trillion and just raised $122b.

The only next step is the public market.

epolanski2• 2 months ago

Meanwhile Chinese AI companies outputting open weight models nearly as good are valued in the low single digit billions. Go figure.

0xDEAFBEAD13• 2 months ago

the private market can't possibly go any higher

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...

nicce• 2 months ago

I think it's because the private market can't possibly go any higher. OpenAI is already valued at around $1 trillion and just raised $122b.

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.

furyg3• 2 months ago

This is also my understanding of why Twitter (and thus Grok) was acquired by SpaceX (which was already having an IPO). Less to do with GPUs in space, more to do with the first way to invest 'directly in AI companies without a proxy (e.g. nvidia).

utopiah3• 2 months ago

free market concept should move the prices down

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.

skybrian3• 2 months ago

Prices do go down for electronics:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-consumer-go...

scrollop• 2 months ago

Since it appears that LLMs can't achieve AGI and lose hallucinations, I presume a new company will appear with a new architecture that can - what happens to the current behemoths and their stock prices? Will they jump architectures?

Splendidly interesting times.

killerstorm• 2 months ago

That's not how money works. It's not an asset which is subject to conservation of matter like gold.

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.

marcosdumay5• 2 months ago

There are regulations that mostly forbid stock movements from creating new money. The money available for an IPO is pretty much finite and independent of those companies' actions.

amusingimpala752• 2 months ago

How does a company even consider this while the CFO is privately saying the books / revenue accounting are not ready for public scrutiny?

Edit: Or has so much somehow changed in two weeks that it’s no longer necessary to wait until next year?

bayarearefugee• 2 months ago

How does a company even consider this while the CFO is privately saying the books / revenue accounting are not ready for public scrutiny?

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).

throwaway-away2• 2 months ago

Crime is legal, but investors can and will dissect your 10-Q/10-K statements. Anyway, I think that the Administration covering their asses in the face of doubtful numbers will shake investor confidence in the tech field. In fact, most investors will think one of these two things:

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.

lumost2• 2 months ago

These companies are burning enough cash that they will need to be public.

We’re about to have 3 of the worlds’s largest corporations be massively in the red.

overfeed• 2 months ago

Don't worry - they'll make it up with volume!

czhu12• 2 months ago

Anthropic said they’ll be profitable by q2 of this year.

https://www.ft.com/content/a67248e7-f819-4dba-b0f7-3847df0a7...

hattmall• 2 months ago

I believe, but could be wrong, is that the big change is the time frame for index and managed funds buy in. It used to be a year, but it's much shorter now, like 2 weeks. Which means as long as they can maintain a high market cap relative to their exchange for that time period they will be stabilized by institutional funds and basically crowd sourcing any losses to the public and massively cashing out the internal pre-ipo investors.

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.

lupajz• 2 months ago

I think some ETFs need just 5 trading days for it to show. For S&P500, to my knowledge, the stock needs to be traded at least for 1 quarter.

MagicMoonlight• 2 months ago

Yeah it’s a scam

eldenring• 2 months ago

I'm guessing they had a significant revenue spike from gpt 5.4 and gpt 5.5 being so good at coding, and hiccups at anthropic making it easier for programmers to try the models.

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 months ago

The CFO doesn't even report to Sam Altman directly. I would not assume that the decision is up to her in any meaningful way. I predicted a while ago and still stand by an 80% chance that their S1 is disastrous on the scale of WeWork; so, so much of what people think they know about OpenAI's finances is based on snippets and rumors rather than firm audited statements.

ifwinterco2• 2 months ago

They’ll be using every trick in the book to massage the numbers as much as possible, but even so it’s hard to see how an S1 for OpenAI or Anthropic doesn’t look pretty terrible

andsoitis6• 2 months ago

Sarah Friar, the CFO, took both Nextdoor and Block public.

wg06• 2 months ago

Current administration might rig the rules to take the credit of AI boom.

Even third world doesn't have this much shameless and corrupt regime as much as this one is.

AlecSchueler3• 2 months ago

What is the third world in 2026?

mrtksn• 2 months ago

Can't they just tell GPT-5.5 to fix their books, make no mistakes? Are the accountants also not replaceable by AI when doctors, lawyers and engineers are?

CTDOCodebases• 2 months ago

Maybe they need those accountants to buy stock first before they put them all out of work?

jstummbillig• 2 months ago

Given the nature of private conversations, I suppose there is no source to this claim?

gizajob• 2 months ago

They say that the CFO isnt ready for public scrutiny and deny her access to the accounting.

henry2023• 2 months ago

Soon to be part of your portfolio if you hold Nasdaq 100 or S&P 500 trackers line QQQ or SPY.

seydor• 2 months ago

What will managed funds do?

Are we now suggesting people get out of index funds?

Worse, will this and spacex ipo destroy the index funds?

karmakurtisaani8• 2 months ago

Destroy is a strong word. Rather, it will make the pension funds and passive investors the bag holders for the oligarchs.

eloisant• 2 months ago

The important thing to remember is:

- 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

coliveira5• 2 months ago

ETFs are a trap. Put most of your money in single stocks. It is ok to diversify, you don't need an ETF for this.

sentientslug• 2 months ago

This is terrible advice, are you buying and self balancing hundreds of different stocks?

pixelatedindex• 2 months ago

It is ok to diversify

Nay, it is not just “ok”. It is imperative that you diversify if you want a strong and resilient portfolio.

cleaning• 2 months ago

I prefer the casino.

skippyboxedhero• 2 months ago

return on the average stock is -2% iirc, terrible idea

Danox7• 2 months ago

Absolutely, I moved all my investments to single stocks that I thought would do well that decision the best that I’ve ever made from an investment standpoint, the returns are infinitely better…

derwiki3• 2 months ago

Upside of robo advisors?

sixhobbits• 2 months ago

Afaik, Nasdaq removed the seasoning rules to include it from the start, S&P would usually be only a year after IPO but they are also discussing changes

eclipsetheworld• 2 months ago

Collectively, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia already own approximately 25 - 35% of OpenAI and Anthropic respectively. They already are a part of your portfolio.

bob1029• 2 months ago

This kind of indirect exposure might look good on paper but it's never even remotely a linear mapping in practice. Holding the underlying directly is the best bet if you want to minimize the possibility of getting screwed over by external factors while maximizing your practical exposure. It really sucks to be right and still get punished for it because Xbox or windows shit the bed last quarter.

juleiie4• 2 months ago

So these extremely risky companies will become a big part of American retirement funds.

I am sure nothing bad will happen

gpt5• 2 months ago

Note that index funds don't hold companies in proportion to their market cap, but in proportion to their free float (shares available to purchase on the market).

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).

nly2• 2 months ago

"free-float adjusted" is the key term

FireBy2024• 2 months ago

5% of 2T would be $100B, not $100M.

psvv3• 2 months ago

That's true for the S&P but not nasdaq, nasdaq is market cap weighted. There used to be a limit that the available float couldn't go below something like 20%. (This is because 5% float available but 100% market cap would cause a huge supply/demand mismatch). But for spacex they changed the rule so there's no minimum, it's just that below 20% float, companies would be weighted at 5x the float instead of 100% of market cap. If spacex is planning on something like 5% float, it would be weighted around 25% of market cap with only 5% of float available to buy.

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.

bandrami3• 2 months ago

Cool does this mean they'll disclose their revenues and expenses in line with GAAP?

jcfrei• 2 months ago

yes, they will.

bandrami3• 2 months ago

That will be interesting, to say the least

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

I can't wait to invest an OpenAI and lose all my retirement fund.

wg06• 2 months ago

Anthropic is also a suitable choice.

amanaplanacanal7• 2 months ago

And SpaceX, of course.

bandrami3• 2 months ago

Cool so will they release revenue and expense numbers in line with GAAP?

noobermin• 2 months ago

Trying to get your money out while there's still time! Quickly now!

techtuate• 2 months ago

I was wrong - not investing in FB and Amazon many years ago - thought those businesses will shrivel and die. I believe OpenAI is a bit of a coin flip as the AI space evolves. In fact I feel all AI will be marginal return generators at best. There are a lot of incumbents and a lot more coming as barriers to entry get increasingly lower. Unless a company can build a near monopoly it'll be hard to justify a 100X revenue valuation despite heavy losses. I feel it's safer to take a punt on alternate compute companies (Musk leads but others exist) than take a bet on one of many AI companies to build a monopoly.

Cyclone_• 2 months ago

Anthropic actually turned an operating profit recently due to huge revenue growth.

hauntingseaweed• 2 months ago

Do you have a source for that claim?

psb5• 2 months ago

All that is a side show. What would you have done with the cash if you were right? Thats always the real story.

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.

anal_reactor5• 2 months ago

I would retire.

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.

roysting• 2 months ago

We love in a kind of bizarro world where the “capitalists” have printed so much money that they’re wildly inefficient in allocation of resources, as evident by all the excess cash sloshing around; while the “communists” of China and to some degree Russia and the BRICS in general are widely efficient in allocation of resources, as evident by the creativity and innovation and advancements they’ve made in very short order.

That’s at least my generalized perspective.

mrweasel2• 2 months ago

Never thought about Amazon, but I did completely expect Facebook to tank. Apparently I underestimated their level of deviousness and willingness to manipulate people.

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.

cmrdporcupine• 2 months ago

For the first year or more after IPO Facebook's stock was completely flat. I bought around the IPO and it went down significantly and only recovered after a couple years. I stupidly sold at that point once I'd had about a 10 or 15% gain.

dbbk2• 2 months ago

If you were going to invest in any AI company literally the only one I would trust to still exist in 10 years would be Google

chvid• 2 months ago

Yep. Two simple boring bets on AI: NVIDIA and Google.

mgrunwald_• 2 months ago

Exactly. I remember the beginnings of ChatGPT, OpenAI looked like the future and Google had Bard, which was not very good. It looked like Google was soon to become irrelevant. Fast forward to today and they have a lot of great products in this space powered by their own custom AI chips.

siren20264• 2 months ago

Funny how 3 years ago everyone agreed Google would never adapt to AI (I still remember all the comments here). And suddenly they should be "literally the only ones"?

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.

HacklesRaised• 2 months ago

^^^^ THIS

sixtyj2• 2 months ago

WCGW… Companies with $500B+ valuation don’t bancrupt…

Enron entered the chat.

Spooky232• 2 months ago

If Enron were running today, they’d put Don Jr on the board, have the US Attorney reassigned to Guam, and sell them Venezuela for a dollar.

serial_dev• 2 months ago

IMO they cannot let OpenAI fail.

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)

bigfishrunning• 2 months ago

The bubble either pops or it gets bigger. We've survived worse, better it pops now.

swader999• 2 months ago

Everyone forgets that Amazon, Google, eBay had tens of competitors at the time. We only remember the winners.

wg06• 2 months ago

If you're an investor you should try Deepseekv4 before you put your hard earned money in this gambling spree.

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"

nujabe• 2 months ago

Isn’t knowing how to scale and optimize llm traffic the main barrier ?

wg06• 2 months ago

That's just a "more hardware" problem.

0xDEAFBEAD13• 2 months ago

I'll bet Deepseekv4 could answer any questions you had related to that. How much of a moat will it prove to be in the long run? "Scale and optimize" sounds like a commodity business.

cultofmetatron• 2 months ago

Deepseekv4 is freely available to download you can host your own and sell it keeping the proceeds and it rivals Claude Opus 4.7.

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.

Glohrischi2• 2 months ago

Companies still pay 5k and more for a basic website. 5-10k is quite affordable.

Investment is not basic math. Its also dependencies to US companies, trust etc.

hootz• 2 months ago

It's not "there will be", there already is a market of generic providers and you can use millions of tokens of DeepSeek-v4-flash for like 1 dollar.

https://models.dev/?search=deepseek-v4-flash

zackify• 2 months ago

https://github.com/antirez/ds4

Bnjoroge2• 2 months ago

You only need about a mac w 96GB or 128gb to run deepseek v4flash with ds4(https://github.com/antirez/ds4). Works mostly well

rootnod3• 2 months ago

But...so does the tech sector. They will also have to continually upgrade their AI slop data centers to run newer better models, generating a heap of waste along it. And that money has to be made back.

tootie• 2 months ago

Can I rent space in Colossus2?

zozbot2347• 2 months ago

good luck getting a machine that can run its specs though.

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.

gopher_space• 2 months ago

I've been taking the opposite approach by playing around with different hardware bottlenecks, and the models I can run on base-level (e.g. 1050 ti, i5-7th) machines are all useful for specific tasks if I deconstruct a process far enough.

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.

up2isomorphism• 2 months ago

Even investor knows this well, they will still do that if they can make other people to invest their hard earned moneys into this after them.

ReptileMan2• 2 months ago

It is worse than GPT5.5 ... but is so cheap that it doesn't really matter.

dirasieb• 2 months ago

cheap for whom? local hardware + electricity bills don’t even begin to get close to frontier model subscription even in price

mrandish• 2 months ago

Ironically, for-profit Chinese companies have released far more Open AI than OpenAI. And they may be a key reason the for-profit OpenAI remains non-profitable.

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.

maerF0x0• 2 months ago

They don't need to profit when they have a government backstop and a nationstate strategy in place. China beating America in AI isn't just about who gets to generate the images/videos of cats.

hakfoo• 2 months ago

I wonder if there's a "commoditize your complement" play in there somewhere.

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.

selicos• 2 months ago

I just need another.. 522-716gb of RAM for one of the Pro models. But the DeepSeek V4 Flash - GGOUF for ds4 is only 4gb.

BoorishBears• 2 months ago

If you're an investor, you should read up on what's happening to those of us who need to rent 8xB200 to run a model like DSV4.

sharts• 2 months ago

Now everyone is on the hook for this overpriced unprofitable monstrosity vis a vis pension and index funds. How much longer for the coming economic collapse…

karmakurtisaani8• 2 months ago

It should still take a year until it's added to the indices, no? At least that's how I understood the SpaceX case: Elon wanted to rush it and get it done in 6 months.

So there's still hope that the bubble pops before the funds are poisoned.

grey-area• 2 months ago

Indexes forcing investing will prop the bubble up. It will burst when nobody expects it after a massive IPO pop which makes believers even of the skeptical.

chillfox• 2 months ago

lol, they reduced the wait time drastically last year I think it's a few weeks now.

maplethorpe• 2 months ago

If they list on the Nasdaq, recent changes mean they can now be added after 15 days, instead of 12 months.

https://www.etfstream.com/articles/spacex-to-ipo-on-nasdaq-a...

thincopperfoil• 2 months ago

This is what exponential growth in a limited world looks like.

vasco• 2 months ago

I'd be willing to make this a ban-bet, but my prediction is that either OpenAI or SpaceX's IPO will flop and that will be the signal that will start the new stock market crash. When it happens people will point at how obvious it was with the war and the bubble going for a while. But these 2 mega IPOs back to back will be interesting to follow.

irkeek• 2 months ago

Has there been any good recent ipo’s?

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.

trilogic2• 2 months ago

Anthropic is currently in talks with investors to raise money at a $900 billion valuation, which would push it ahead of OpenAI.

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.

apexalpha• 2 months ago

How you go from 380 to 900 billions in a month, I am very curious?

Mythos Marketing.

trilogic2• 2 months ago

Well having "Mythos" at our offices (maybe not so good but 90% or maybe even better) would it be worth 1 Billion, Just saying!

cft• 2 months ago

Expect ⅕ codex quotas after

avazhi2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

lelanthran3• 2 months ago

I have no personal skin in the game, but OpenAI seems like the weakest player. Claude and Gemini are both blatantly better.

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.

avazhi2• 2 months ago

The market doesn't necessarily reward better products or (in this case) more intelligence.

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.

orwin2• 2 months ago

Honestly, even if anthropic models are better than OpenAIs, I don't understand how they want to make money. In October last year, the frontier models from US companies were so much better than the cheapest models, I thought it was over, but nowadays, even smaller models perform adequately enough. I now use free models (or rather, very cheap ones) in all of my personal projects, and even though anthropic's harness is hard to replace on complex cases (it helps understand where the LLM failed better, which allows to correct the mistakes more easily), I'm pretty sure pure LLM gains are less and less with each new models.

greatgib• 2 months ago

Anthropic models are well used for coding and similar tasks, and mostly through their own tooling as they are pretty aggressive limiting other usage.

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.

KellyCriterion2• 2 months ago

OpenAI will let down trousers first, Anthropic will be wise to not IPO this year: SpaceX will collect a lot of money, i guess; then OAI afterwards.

zurfer• 2 months ago

Anthropic will probably IPO as well

KellyCriterion2• 2 months ago

I suspect they might delay if the numbers of OAI are public; and two big IPO before yours (and one of a competitor) is a tricky situation.

I would postpone on the very last minute, depending on what my competitors numbers say :-D

cdnsteve• 2 months ago

Non profit files for IPO should be the headline.

dude250711• 2 months ago

An unprofitable non-profit.

tjstarak• 2 months ago

Un-profit for short.

DarkNova6• 2 months ago

“For-Profit ClosedAI” would work too

pkos98• 2 months ago

For-Profit Non-Profitable Closed-AI company called OpenAI

vdfs2• 2 months ago

Technically they are not profitable

Avicebron• 2 months ago

nonprofitable ex-non-profit seeks profit via AGI (A Giant IPO)?

xnickb• 2 months ago

I understand what you're saying, but strictly speaking is it fair to say they aren't profitable? Didn't they along with other participants of LLM-race invest heavily into the infrastructure and the said infra wasn't yet delivered.

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.

lenerdenator• 2 months ago

This has less to do with their balance sheet and more to do with the intent of the organization when it was founded. They were supposed to create open-source AI models and only let revenues influence the direction of the organization so much when weighed against the public good.

... 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.

utopiah3• 2 months ago

they're still on the building stage

Eh... what's left to build? Actual AI?

marcosdumay5• 2 months ago

My understanding is that it's unreasonable to claim a hotel isn't profitable when they're still on the building stage.

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.

Glohrischi2• 2 months ago

No because they are not a non-profit since 2025.

m00dy• 2 months ago

we are approaching end of the party.

AFF87• 2 months ago

Reporting is going to be interesting. I wonder how their filings will look like and what will appear there

535188B17C93743• 2 months ago

SpaceX and OpenAI? Market's gettin' frothy. Oh, this bubble is about to pop.

Shailendra_S• 2 months ago

good to know.. this is a news for me..

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 months ago

Alternative to archive.md

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

skybrian3• 2 months ago

On an iPad, the first link is to a prompt to install an app.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 months ago

"Anyone else having issues accessing www.msn.com on their iPad? Keep getting a blog error. Wondering if it's just my iPad or a larger issue. I don't have an issue accessing the site from my laptop though."

"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...

wbsun• 2 months ago

5 trillion IPO of three companies this year! They still need real money to buy the offered stocks, I am wondering which markets will be sold in order for investors to get the cash.

chrisss395• 2 months ago

How many retail investors plan to buy? The folks I hear most excited about this have equity from the startup/PE companies they were involved in and are treating it like a big future payday. Apparently there is a big Whatsapp chat for them to discuss it all.

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.

HeartStrings• 2 months ago

Time to dump on the npcs

swiftcoder3• 2 months ago

Hypothetically, isn't the whole upside here already priced into NVidia?

ololobus• 2 months ago

Just speculating and thinking out loud. I think this might be a good news for AI-skeptics. Going with IPO means that investors finally want to get some cash that they cannot get by any other means. There are good examples of private market companies staying like that for many years because they are profitable, they have plenty of cash, and they have a queue of investors eager to put more cash

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

darkwizard42• 2 months ago

I'm not sure how you drew the conclusion they don't think it will be profitable soon or an AI ceiling.

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.

peterspath• 2 months ago

Probably a good stock to short on!

toyetic• 2 months ago

Interesting that they're doing it now I wonder why, it wasn't to long ago the CFO was reported as being strongly against it [1]

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.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-cfo-news/

pacman1337• 2 months ago

A lot of people don't understand that creating a startup is not about having the best product in the market. It is about convincing people to part with their money and give it to them to control and gain power with, through having people work on what you want them to work on. Only requirement is you create a story of why they should give you money. Even if it is the dumbest idea and you will be lose all it in 3 years. If you can tell a convincing story you will still make yourself and your friends super rich.

siren20264• 2 months ago

Praying for this to flail hard on day one.

soundworlds• 2 months ago

I am praying for valuation to reflect real value.

But the US stock market of the last 4 years has shown it is grounded in hype far more than real value..

futuredevtech• 2 months ago

If this goes through, it’ll be interesting to see how they reconcile “mission-driven AGI lab” with public market pressure. Those incentives tend to collide quickly.

ulfw• 2 months ago

Bubble about to burst. Everyone getting ready to get their IPOs out before it's too late.

2000 was exactly like this

whateveracct• 2 months ago

and it'll be in your 401k within 3 trading weeks due to recent nasdaq rule changes. SpaceX is already on its way.

we're all gonna hold the AI bag.

tana_shahh• 2 months ago

We got a non-profit filing for IPO before GTA-6!

OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon

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