- OpenAI wants to be the consumer version of AI, modeled after Google and Meta, with a mostly free universal service powered by ads and e-commerce. They haven't fully shown that model can work. The big problem is the lack of zero marginal costs as each new user requires GPU spend.
- Anthropic positions itself more as enterprise AI, modeled after Microsoft ironically enough, and charges big companies for services. The economics of coding agents work but GPUs get expensive fast and open models are getting good enough for most use cases.
So it's a race between ads and e-commerce offsetting AI spend and open source eating almost everyone's lunch.
Even open source models need hardware and energy to inference. Therefore, anyone offering a free ChatGPT competitor will be using the same unit economics.
My bet is that OpenAI will make free ChatGPT work through ads.
The window has basically closed for them for the time being. The business math just isn’t there.
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.
The math doesn’t help Anthropic either but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked. That makes a huge difference when pitching an IPO.
I think they may have overplayed their hand so to speak. The end consequence is that their best model isn’t available right now, people are exploring alternatives, and realizing they work fine.
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.
> but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked
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.
> But I'd be careful about conflating either of them with the market.
The finance market and the market for these products are two different things. Anthropic has definitely been stealing market share to OpenAI in the past few month on many segments (be it enterprise or even consumers).
The advertising angle is significantly overrated. Theres only so many ad dollars to go around and so every dollar they make they have to take from so other player like Google. With Google having decent AI search now for free OpenAI is already well behind here.
Users coming from Chat or Claude or the likes would be very high intent if done correctly, advertisers would pay a lot of money. I'm certain people would pull budget from Google.
But Google has chat too now plus a ton more data about users OpenAI doesn’t have. There really isn’t anything OpenAI can do that Google isn’t also already doing.
There are only so many ad dollars to go around. ChatGPT getting traffic doesn't mean they can convince ad buyers that their dollar goes further than at established players like Google and Meta. AI search is a commodity at this point, even DuckDuckGo has it.
Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.
Because reddit users are low quality users. Meta and Google can peak into your data and segment you to sell.
ChatGPT ads are low quality placed at the bottom barely noticed.
ChatGPT ads will get better. Meta's social userbase is drying up. Google keeps introducing and removing things from chrome to keep access to spy on you for them alone. We'll see how things pan out but in ten more years reddit ads will still be worthless.
How can you tell that? "The Market" at the moment is the private investor market and, to my (admittedly untrained) eye, those two companies are being treated exactly the same when they raise.
I doubt that anyone at OpenAI would let their payday decrease. If anything, they got assurances that everyone would keep the bubble going until 2028 no matter what.
What do you mean? I promise I'm not being facetious or satirical. I'm just too simple and conservative of an investor to understand this comment. (for example: Is the price-to-earnings ratio too high? I probably wouldn't want to invest in the business.)
They are losing too much money. With open source options that are always close to frontier performance it will always be hard for them reduce training costs and charge premium rates.
OpenAI and Anthropic valuations are based on the premise that they may develop AGI in the near future. How do you value a company based on that premise? Throwing regulations into the mix doesn't make the problem much harder than it already is.
AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them, or perhaps they see political winds favorable to regulatory capture in the future and are waiting for that?
> AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them
The populist backlash is coming for datacenters. I'm unconvinced that's truly problematic to these companies given data travels close to the speed of light and plenty of countries have energy, data interconnects and governments unresponsive to locals' concerns.
This morning I heard a convincing argument that the data center backlash is only really significant in the USA because jobs here equal health care access. Europeans can afford to be less threatened existentially.
Data centers are the next Dark Fiber from 2000. After VCs and private Equity fund them there will not be sufficient demand because AI will inevitably not entirely live up to all the hype. The fire sale will eventually begin. Then Google, M$, Apple and Amazon will buy them at a discount just like Google snatched up the dark fiber after 2000.
They need to do something new like create a more efficient battery formula out of recyclable abundant components. Hydrogen + Oxygen and Water are a good abundant recyclable example but also so is Gravity. Nightly / seasonal / long term energy storage needs another compact and efficient solution as elegant as these but better. (saying superconductors is cheating)
This is patently false, don't spread rumors. Voluntarily delaying release at the request of the government is not the same as imposing export controls.
I hesitate to call anything "voluntary" when a competitor company was declared a domestic supply chain risk for refusing to do everything the administration requested.
By saying it’s false you are also spreading a rumor that OpenAI is goated by us defense. The reality is we don’t know the truth. But since we are spouting off rumors: Government could have given them a national security letter that says, “send all of your prompts and response data to a mirror run by NSA”
If Anthropic tanks in the public markets, that will cause a revaluation of OpenAI in the private markets. If they delay IPO to try another private round, they also want to sign that round early.
Perhaps that's Anthropic's plan, is they believe OpenAI is weak. If the IPO is good they win. If it's bad OpenAI loses.
> They just want to see Anthropic crash first and then be the last survivor.
I don't think so. There's only two real options here:
1. There's no bubble to pop
2. There's a bubble to pop
In the first case, the first AI company to IPO gets a ton of money from the market who wants to get in on this, and the second to IPO finds that there's not enough capital left in the public markets and has to sell for less than they'd wanted to.
In the second case, the fir5st to IPO gets money from their shares, which drop in value (bubble popping), adn the second to IPO gets absolutely nothing (bubble popped).
In both cases, the first to IPO gets the rewards, the second gets either less or nothing.
It's over. Open models and chinese models will make fast progress and that nvidia+ms 128gb monster is what everyone will end up buying. sama can go back to running scams.
I actually see this as an indicator that they still feel they can comfortably raise in the private market. If they tried to rush an IPO into an indifferent public market it would look worse, in my opinion. I'm not saying they're in great shape--they may be in terrible shape for all I know. But I think rushing the IPO would send a worse message than holding off.
> The A.I. company’s advisers are pushing its chief executive, Sam Altman, to move slowly after SpaceX’s stock has been volatile and as the start-up grapples with financial challenges.
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?
> if your company isn't just blowing smoke then you have nothing to worry about
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.
I mean, my comment wasn't necessarily meant to be some insightful analysis. But I do find it weird that OpenAI has seemingly gone from racing Anthropic to "maybe in 6 months" in the span of a week.
> OpenAI has seemingly gone from racing Anthropic to "maybe in 6 months" in the span of a week
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 A.I. company’s advisers are pushing its chief executive, Sam Altman, to move slowly after SpaceX’s stock has been volatile and as the start-up grapples with financial challenges.
SpaceX's stock volatile? It's a shame nobody saw that coming.
But they are going to coincide lockups with the release of additional stock float from 5% up to 20% of the total "valuation" with a 3x QQQ multiplier so that stock indexes will treat them as 60% float even though 2/3rds of those shares are unavailable. Thus they guarantee that even more shares must be bought by tracking ETFs and institutional buyers. Everybody (that already owns pre-IPO shares) wins!
It's also a tiny effect given the total-market funds buy small amounts of each company, and the NASDAQ 100 isn't particularly big.
If S&P had changed its rules for the S&P 500, there would have been an effect. In the end, the drama was almost entirely a spectacle for finance influencers and their viewers.
QQQ is the largest of the Nasdaq100 tracking funds. It's only about 1%, increasing to 4% of the QQQ, which is ~$350B in size.
So it's only $3.5B of forced buying or a little less that 5% (of $75B).
For the second float would be and additional ~$14B, again about 5%.
Launched in the same way they launch Starship, full of ambition, promising a bit too much, but might explode at any moment. Either way it will be a spectacular show regardless of what happen.
It's actually remained about 14% or more above the IPO price which is roughly what you'd want but gone up and down a bit.
It's funny with stock prices - they all go up and down a bit in kind of random ways but people project all sorts of stories onto them that often don't relate much to reality.
It peaked at around +60% from IPO price and swung daily around 10-15%. It’s possible it’s starting to stabilize but that first week was basically the definition of volatile.
I was really hoping that they Ipoed this year, so we can see their stock shoot up and down in flames, and we're really done with them and Sam Altman, once and for all.
While spcx has room to go up or down from where it is today, the reality is it that didn't drop like a rock on IPO day, so wall street bets vibes-based online "analysis" investing is only good for paper money.
Part of the issue is the respective positioning:
- OpenAI wants to be the consumer version of AI, modeled after Google and Meta, with a mostly free universal service powered by ads and e-commerce. They haven't fully shown that model can work. The big problem is the lack of zero marginal costs as each new user requires GPU spend.
- Anthropic positions itself more as enterprise AI, modeled after Microsoft ironically enough, and charges big companies for services. The economics of coding agents work but GPUs get expensive fast and open models are getting good enough for most use cases.
So it's a race between ads and e-commerce offsetting AI spend and open source eating almost everyone's lunch.
Even open source models need hardware and energy to inference. Therefore, anyone offering a free ChatGPT competitor will be using the same unit economics.
My bet is that OpenAI will make free ChatGPT work through ads.
The window has basically closed for them for the time being. The business math just isn’t there.
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.
> window has basically closed for them for the time being. The business math just isn’t there
Unless Anthropic also cancels its IPO, this probably isn't it.
The math doesn’t help Anthropic either but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked. That makes a huge difference when pitching an IPO.
Agree but Anthropic momentum is fading too.
Open source is starting to slowly become a source of frustration for frontier labs In the discussion around value for money.
How is momentum fading when their headline product is so good it’s illegal?
is no longer being able to sell it to half of your market good, financially?
I think they may have overplayed their hand so to speak. The end consequence is that their best model isn’t available right now, people are exploring alternatives, and realizing they work fine.
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.
Thankfully, many tech companies have shortened parental leave to 6 weeks!
That is a good marketing headline, but for it to work the model has to become available again in a reasonable timeframe.
Otherwise people try other cheaper models, and they find out those models work perfectly for what they need.
Expected cash flows, growth and risk.
Go ahead and incorporate that in those 3 variables... lets see what you know before I bother replying.
How do you grow your business when your flagship product is illegal?
easy - lobbying
Hasn’t worked for them so far
They don’t pay enough
Yeh local models will continue to gain performance before they can IPO
I only use free Gemini Pro to plan then scrape the log in Google Drive into local Qwen/Gemma+pi set up
I can plan and architect with Gemini on my phone or wherever and a cron job + custom JSON parser at home updates context in local model setup
> Open source is starting to slowly become a source of frustration for frontier labs In the discussion around value for money.
Ironic, considering that they got their ball rolling by taking from Open Source with neither credit nor attribution.
> but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked
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.
> But I'd be careful about conflating either of them with the market.
The finance market and the market for these products are two different things. Anthropic has definitely been stealing market share to OpenAI in the past few month on many segments (be it enterprise or even consumers).
it's not just media. or rather media is reporting based on fund interests.
> media is reporting based on fund interests
Can you give an example that shows funds actually souring on OpenAI? (Like, not less enthusiastic than before. Actually souring. Selling.)
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world and gets a ridiculous amount of user data. They're going to be an advertising powerhouse.
The advertising angle is significantly overrated. Theres only so many ad dollars to go around and so every dollar they make they have to take from so other player like Google. With Google having decent AI search now for free OpenAI is already well behind here.
Users coming from Chat or Claude or the likes would be very high intent if done correctly, advertisers would pay a lot of money. I'm certain people would pull budget from Google.
But Google has chat too now plus a ton more data about users OpenAI doesn’t have. There really isn’t anything OpenAI can do that Google isn’t also already doing.
Honestly if ads start getting put into chats that service is dead to me
Useless stat without breakdown of time spent at the site and bot activity.
It will draw a non-zero number just curious people who never use ChatGPT.
And bots are exfiltrating model knowledge for the benefit of competition.
There are only so many ad dollars to go around. ChatGPT getting traffic doesn't mean they can convince ad buyers that their dollar goes further than at established players like Google and Meta. AI search is a commodity at this point, even DuckDuckGo has it.
Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.
Because reddit users are low quality users. Meta and Google can peak into your data and segment you to sell.
ChatGPT ads are low quality placed at the bottom barely noticed.
ChatGPT ads will get better. Meta's social userbase is drying up. Google keeps introducing and removing things from chrome to keep access to spy on you for them alone. We'll see how things pan out but in ten more years reddit ads will still be worthless.
I think a lot of money and effort is spent on advertising on reddit. It just goes to astroturfing instead of paying Reddit.
> Anthropic is seen as having momentum.
How can you tell that? "The Market" at the moment is the private investor market and, to my (admittedly untrained) eye, those two companies are being treated exactly the same when they raise.
I doubt that anyone at OpenAI would let their payday decrease. If anything, they got assurances that everyone would keep the bubble going until 2028 no matter what.
> The business math just isn’t there.
What do you mean? I promise I'm not being facetious or satirical. I'm just too simple and conservative of an investor to understand this comment. (for example: Is the price-to-earnings ratio too high? I probably wouldn't want to invest in the business.)
They are losing too much money. With open source options that are always close to frontier performance it will always be hard for them reduce training costs and charge premium rates.
I guess my point is that IPO timing is irrelevant if they don’t have an actual profitable business.
There may never be another window. They will run out of money especially if open models catch up.
They should have done it a year or two ago when the hype was strong.
Today everyone knows there's no agi coming up and it will be a very long time until they generate any profits, if ever.
With all the uncertainty about AI regulation, I don't think now is the time.
How do you even value a company when we don't even know if GPT-6 will be made available to the general public?
I’m not so sure the uncertainty around _regulation_ is the concern here.
OpenAI and Anthropic valuations are based on the premise that they may develop AGI in the near future. How do you value a company based on that premise? Throwing regulations into the mix doesn't make the problem much harder than it already is.
AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them, or perhaps they see political winds favorable to regulatory capture in the future and are waiting for that?
> AI exits in America probably have a political cliff approaching fast as populist backlash will hit them
The populist backlash is coming for datacenters. I'm unconvinced that's truly problematic to these companies given data travels close to the speed of light and plenty of countries have energy, data interconnects and governments unresponsive to locals' concerns.
This morning I heard a convincing argument that the data center backlash is only really significant in the USA because jobs here equal health care access. Europeans can afford to be less threatened existentially.
Its also about pollution and water and similar concerns
Data centers are the next Dark Fiber from 2000. After VCs and private Equity fund them there will not be sufficient demand because AI will inevitably not entirely live up to all the hype. The fire sale will eventually begin. Then Google, M$, Apple and Amazon will buy them at a discount just like Google snatched up the dark fiber after 2000.
They realised their numbers are much worse than anthropics
You know anthropics numbers? They still haven’t filed either.
They said they’re profitable on operating profit.
Think it’s pretty safe to assume theirs are less of a dumpster fire
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” as the saying goes.
Maybe they will show major Ad revenue and Codex sales and get a higher price next year but it’s a risk.
Maybe they want a Mythos level model first.
Good news: GPT-5.6 has been export restricted.
Where are the anecdotes about it hacking the NSA though?
It's not even out yet. Give it a second.
They need to do something new like create a more efficient battery formula out of recyclable abundant components. Hydrogen + Oxygen and Water are a good abundant recyclable example but also so is Gravity. Nightly / seasonal / long term energy storage needs another compact and efficient solution as elegant as these but better. (saying superconductors is cheating)
This is patently false, don't spread rumors. Voluntarily delaying release at the request of the government is not the same as imposing export controls.
I hesitate to call anything "voluntary" when a competitor company was declared a domestic supply chain risk for refusing to do everything the administration requested.
I would categorize the op as "technically false" but if they don't voluntarily delay, they would be export controlled.
Like being export controlled if you don't track everyone's identities is a form of imposing export restrictions. That is a true statement.
By saying it’s false you are also spreading a rumor that OpenAI is goated by us defense. The reality is we don’t know the truth. But since we are spouting off rumors: Government could have given them a national security letter that says, “send all of your prompts and response data to a mirror run by NSA”
What? the gov decides who does and who does not get it... i.e restricts who has access.
Why do you say "voluntary"?
> up from the company’s last private valuation of $730 million
typo
For now.. ;)
They just want to see Anthropic crash first and then be the last survivor.
If Anthropic tanks in the public markets, that will cause a revaluation of OpenAI in the private markets. If they delay IPO to try another private round, they also want to sign that round early.
Perhaps that's Anthropic's plan, is they believe OpenAI is weak. If the IPO is good they win. If it's bad OpenAI loses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage#Second-m...
SpaceX moved first so it’s 3rd move advantage?
> They just want to see Anthropic crash first and then be the last survivor.
I don't think so. There's only two real options here:
1. There's no bubble to pop
2. There's a bubble to pop
In the first case, the first AI company to IPO gets a ton of money from the market who wants to get in on this, and the second to IPO finds that there's not enough capital left in the public markets and has to sell for less than they'd wanted to.
In the second case, the fir5st to IPO gets money from their shares, which drop in value (bubble popping), adn the second to IPO gets absolutely nothing (bubble popped).
In both cases, the first to IPO gets the rewards, the second gets either less or nothing.
The first ai IPO is spaceX.
Its already not anthropic or openAI.
But there might still be some water in the well for the second one, there definitely won't be for the third one.
It's over. Open models and chinese models will make fast progress and that nvidia+ms 128gb monster is what everyone will end up buying. sama can go back to running scams.
OpenAI is in deep trouble is what I am reading into this
Why?
I actually see this as an indicator that they still feel they can comfortably raise in the private market. If they tried to rush an IPO into an indifferent public market it would look worse, in my opinion. I'm not saying they're in great shape--they may be in terrible shape for all I know. But I think rushing the IPO would send a worse message than holding off.
> The A.I. company’s advisers are pushing its chief executive, Sam Altman, to move slowly after SpaceX’s stock has been volatile and as the start-up grapples with financial challenges.
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?
> if your company isn't just blowing smoke then you have nothing to worry about
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.
I mean, my comment wasn't necessarily meant to be some insightful analysis. But I do find it weird that OpenAI has seemingly gone from racing Anthropic to "maybe in 6 months" in the span of a week.
> OpenAI has seemingly gone from racing Anthropic to "maybe in 6 months" in the span of a week
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.
I mean, they did the "confidential S1 filing" thing a few days apart.
Anthropic on 1st June: https://www.anthropic.com/news/confidential-draft-s1-sec
OpenAI shortly before June 8: https://openai.com/index/openai-submits-confidential-s-1/
That was less than a month ago. They seemed to be on a similar pace at least from my point of view.
> The A.I. company’s advisers are pushing its chief executive, Sam Altman, to move slowly after SpaceX’s stock has been volatile and as the start-up grapples with financial challenges.
SpaceX's stock volatile? It's a shame nobody saw that coming.
Is it still being prematurely included in the major index funds?
yes, in few weeks.unfortunately the stock will be back from this slump
Ummm probably not. Lock ups are going to dump far more stock into the market.
But they are going to coincide lockups with the release of additional stock float from 5% up to 20% of the total "valuation" with a 3x QQQ multiplier so that stock indexes will treat them as 60% float even though 2/3rds of those shares are unavailable. Thus they guarantee that even more shares must be bought by tracking ETFs and institutional buyers. Everybody (that already owns pre-IPO shares) wins!
But that's not a secret, and therefore already priced in, right?
It's also a tiny effect given the total-market funds buy small amounts of each company, and the NASDAQ 100 isn't particularly big.
If S&P had changed its rules for the S&P 500, there would have been an effect. In the end, the drama was almost entirely a spectacle for finance influencers and their viewers.
QQQ is the largest of the Nasdaq100 tracking funds. It's only about 1%, increasing to 4% of the QQQ, which is ~$350B in size. So it's only $3.5B of forced buying or a little less that 5% (of $75B). For the second float would be and additional ~$14B, again about 5%.
Only the Nasdaq, which is an intentionally aggressive index. The S&P rejected all proposals.
Launched in the same way they launch Starship, full of ambition, promising a bit too much, but might explode at any moment. Either way it will be a spectacular show regardless of what happen.
Yes, it's actually the first volatile high-profile IPO so you can see why some people need to be reminded of the possibility.
I didn't partake but from elon's shenanigans with bitcoin and doge (the coin, not the govt thing) it seemed clear he'd do similar with the stock
is tesla stock not volatile too? elon stock's are more like today's crypto than a 20th's century company stock w dividends
> shame nobody saw that coming
Seeing something coming is very different from having it not only confirmed but also quantified.
It's actually remained about 14% or more above the IPO price which is roughly what you'd want but gone up and down a bit.
It's funny with stock prices - they all go up and down a bit in kind of random ways but people project all sorts of stories onto them that often don't relate much to reality.
It peaked at around +60% from IPO price and swung daily around 10-15%. It’s possible it’s starting to stabilize but that first week was basically the definition of volatile.
Just googling the ticker shows it at 149, which is below its opening.
> Just googling the ticker shows it at 149, which is below its opening.
I thought it opened at 135.
135 is what you could buy for in the public offering. The shares opened trading at 150.
I was really hoping that they Ipoed this year, so we can see their stock shoot up and down in flames, and we're really done with them and Sam Altman, once and for all.
While spcx has room to go up or down from where it is today, the reality is it that didn't drop like a rock on IPO day, so wall street bets vibes-based online "analysis" investing is only good for paper money.
The investment bankers were in there manipulating, but that's over, and gravity is here.
It is funny to mention “gravity” in reference to company that makes rockets that escape gravity
It might even elicit a mild chuckle when you realize nothing "escapes" gravity. You might be thinking of escape velocity?
Yup, fair enough!
After the IPO Altman will be even more insanely rich, and that time in a more liquid manner. I don’t think he will go away
Bad idea, the AI hype train still has some gas, when it settles in that it's just another tool it's all going to fizzle out.
I can’t wait. It’s gonna be an absolute blast to watch.