Yet another Hacker News

OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target

134 points timr 3 hours ago 112 comments

bronlund 2 hours ago | parent

No no no, don’t burst that AI bubble just yet. I haven’t finished all my side-projects.

gessha 2 hours ago | parent

Once the bubble bursts we can finally sweep up the datacenter GPUs and jerry rig them to our home servers!

Avicebron 2 hours ago | parent

I literally can't wait.

tehlike 1 hour ago | parent

After you upgrade your electric panel and cooling.

ssl-3 1 hour ago | parent

Winter is coming.

__m 1 hour ago | parent

They will probably go to other data centers or company premises.

dawnerd 41 minutes ago | parent

Maybe at first, but server hardware doesn't stay deployed tooo long and ends up liquidated. That was always a looming problem with this rapid buildout. Some hosts like OVH or Hetzner might swipe up some second hand gear, they're not afraid of renting old hardware. But eBay will be flooded once the DCs upgrade / downscale. And it wont be cheap at first either I bet. Everyone will try to cash in on the secondary market hype.

kylehotchkiss 1 hour ago | parent

The government will just nationalize them and use all the compute for poorly defined military tasks

vrganj 1 hour ago | parent

Or to further build out total domestic surveillance, like they've been telegraphing.

dartharva 2 hours ago | parent

The consumer-level services you've gotten used to will still exist no matter how hard the bubble bursts, if it ever does. Way too many players now.

dweinus 2 hours ago | parent

Sure, but you'll have to pay for what it really costs

IncreasePosts 2 hours ago | parent

Inference will keep getting cheaper and cheaper though. Perhaps model releases will be fewer and farther between because these groups can't affording paying out a billion or more in training each generation

kennywinker 1 hour ago | parent

The chinese models are being trained for less than a million a pop.

gpm 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, but Wright's law (cost of making the n^th something (like a token) being exponentially less than the cost of making the first) strongly suggests that post-bubble inference will be significantly cheaper the longer the bubble lasts.

Whether that's a good thing considering the other things those dollars could be going towards...

Spivak 1 hour ago | parent

I mean I'm happy for better but it might start grounding the industry where 1.6% better on some benchmarks doesn't justify hundred million investments.

dools 2 hours ago | parent

I have only ever paid per token for this reason: if I can’t generate sufficient value to cover the real cost I don’t want to invest in using it

taneq 2 hours ago | parent

I thought the incremental supply cost per token wasn’t that high, and the main expense for these companies was the training they do on top of that?

dartharva 1 hour ago | parent

.. which will be the same you are paying today. Token prices are already above their operating costs.

If you're talking about free tiers, yes, that might change as marketing budgets will shrivel up.

simonh 40 minutes ago | parent

If the capital cost gets written off, because it can never be recouped, then there’s only the operating cost left.

Suppose OpenAI goes bust tomorrow and all those data centres get sold for pennies on the dollar. Whoever buys them can operate them at cost.

simianwords 2 hours ago | parent

Over last 3 years on HN I have seen such low quality comments : prophesizing the end of times - the bubble will burst and we will all be so happy after that.

Any tiny news article that indicates even a modicum of challenges for OpenAI will be met with slurry of such comments.

Perhaps it’s good to keep a good epistemic hygiene in all this. OpenAI isn’t going away anywhere soon. AI isn’t going away, in fact we haven’t even started yet.

anonymous908213 1 hour ago | parent

> OpenAI isn’t going away anywhere soon. AI isn’t going away

You have conflated two completely unrelated concepts. LLMs aren't going anywhere, but what good does that do a company burning hundreds of billions to do 20% better than Chinese models trained with millions? The economics don't economic.

simianwords 1 hour ago | parent

According to your argument, OpenAI should simply stop R and D which can result in massive jumps in performance because China may catch up?

What is your prescription if I may ask? Don’t invest in research? Let China do it?

jejeddd 1 hour ago | parent

Can you read?

anonymous908213 1 hour ago | parent

It's far too late for a prescription now because they're already committed to hundreds of billions in spending they don't have, but the reason Chinese companies will win the long game is because they are serious and the Americans are deeply unserious. From the beginning, Chinese labs have viewed LLMs as software tools and developed efficiently. Conversely, Americans are selling a fantasy about creating the machine god if they just throw another hundred billion at it every few months. Altman, Amodei, and Musk are all pathological liars who have oriented their entire companies around deceiving investors and marketing hype rather than engineering principles. They are unbelievably successful at what they set out to do, but what they set out to do was not to build a long-lasting foundation for success.

27183 23 minutes ago | parent

They successfully turned the entire tech sector into a giant pyramid scheme. That's one hell of an accomplishment. I hope history forever remembers the names of everyone who aided and abetted them.

Spivak 1 hour ago | parent

There's no should, only what economics incentivize. Right now we're not paying for the upfront training costs-it's great, the Millennial subsidy continues. But if, and big if right now, the infinite money font dries up and they have to recoup training investment direct from customers then that looks to be a huge price increase on the ground which makes cheap to train and good enough even more attractive than it already is.

dartharva 1 hour ago | parent

It is the α's and Z's brigading in with their over-emotional shortsighted groupthink.

simianwords 1 hour ago | parent

1. GPT-4.5 launch. "AI crash is gonna lead to decade long winter." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206226

2. Claude Code limits tightened. A commenter expects the bubble to pop, while arguing AI will succeed long term. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599297

3. GPT-5 disappoints. "Teetering on the edge of a huge bubble pop." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44966583

4. DeepSeek releases a cheaper model. A commenter expects excess data-centre capacity when the bubble bursts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413548

5. AMD signs an OpenAI chip deal. A commenter predicts a bubble pop and a flood of cheap GPUs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491514

6. Discussion of AI-assisted open-source contributions. A commenter says models must improve soon or the bubble will pop. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45745326

7. Discussion of Opus 4.5 coding. A commenter advises using cheap AI tools before the bubble bursts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521192

8. GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing. "The bubble has burst." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929404

9. DeepSeek runs on one AMD accelerator. A commenter predicts a bubble pop will flood the hardware market. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166790

10. Same DeepSeek thread. "AI is overvalued, so it WILL pop." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167787

Edit: more examples

1. AI on an old CPU: coding gains don’t justify investment; bubble will burst. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938412

2. Nvidia–OpenAI deal stalls: GPU bubble, inflated demand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46834749

3. Lisp machines retrospective: AI bankruptcies and another bubble. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45990309

4. Nvidia customer concentration: AI bubble will pop despite useful technology. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41411258

5. DeepSeek open-source announcement: inflated AI valuations will collapse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126619

6. OpenAI–AWS deal: spending commitments could bring everything crashing down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802550

7. Anthropic funding: final big push before the bubble bursts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45105333

8. Enterprise AI adoption: disappointing returns will pop the bubble within two years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025025

9. OpenAI cash burn: railroad-style bubble and massive investment downturn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439964

derwiki 1 hour ago | parent

OOC did you have this list prepared? You posted it very quickly as a response

dartharva 59 minutes ago | parent

Like I said, brigading botlike behavior.

simonh 46 minutes ago | parent

At this point AI company valuations only make sense if each of them captures most of the value of the entire IT sector. Soon. If that doesn’t happen, it’s a matter of time before reality catches up, but how much time? Who knows. It could be years still.

Or AI could in the next few years generate more value than the whole IT sector a few times over. That would be cool.

vrganj 24 minutes ago | parent

You kind of proved his point about brigading with this giant link dump.

red_green_yell 1 hour ago | parent

It's a reaction to the constant drum beat of doom marketing:

- "our product is too dangerous to release but we can't be bothered to prove its capabilities working in public hacking competitions" - "our product is going to kill everyone" - "our product is going to take all the jobs" - "we have a $40T addressable market" - "in a few days AI will be able to improve itself without human intervention and it's capabilities will hocky stick to infinity!!!"

Followed by absurd financials that spin massive losses as "getting in on the ground floor" before historic profits arrive based on the doom marketing above.

No one is saying AI is going away soon). But OpenAI and Anthro will go the way of Netscape when the market finally stops blindly accepting the doom marketing. Anyone with eyes can see LLMs will create historic increase in productivity among knowledge workers AND it will be a commodity. The massive profits frontier labs need to justify valuations are not coming.

There are AI bears and AI bulls. It's easy to cherry pick extreme and clearly wrong statements from each. But if you actually believe the bears are the more extreme/wrong overall you just aren't paying attention to what the bulls are saying.

hsuduebc2 1 hour ago | parent

Sometines it truly feels like titles of YouTube videos.

tripleee 45 minutes ago | parent

You know "we haven't even started yet" is also prophesying, right?

bulbar 41 minutes ago | parent

Can also be read as observation, as I have observed that many colleagues haven't started yet using AI on a daily basis and I myself is still using methods from months ago (no agent orchestration).

simonh 31 minutes ago | parent

Sure, but both can be true. The internet bubble bursting did not kill the internet. All that investment in severs and fibre was still there, and still got used. A lot of investors lost their shirts, but the Internet future still happened.

OpenAI going bust would not cause those data centres to cease to exist, they’d still be there just owned for cheap by someone else that can run them at cost.

A crash would drastically cut investment and research funding, but research would still happen. New companies would rise from the ashes of the old. It might still trigger a recession though.

27183 17 minutes ago | parent

> OpenAI going bust would not cause those data centres to cease to exist, they’d still be there just owned for cheap by someone else that can run them at cost.

Someone would have to see value in that. Right now the value prop of AI is that maybe someday it'll get better and we'll be able to build useful, profitable consumer products on it. That's not really a great investment thesis, unless you're drunk on the hype.

Now that the market is sobering up a bit, will operating a "cheap" GPU datacenter at cost be worth anything? Not "future value", but present value. Can you turn a healthy profit running a GPU datacenter today? I doubt it.

paaloeye 1 hour ago | parent

Use Ultra mode.

bushbaba 2 hours ago | parent

Welp that’s not a good sign for the anthropic IPO. Curious what happens now that both OpenAI and Anthropic will face budgetary pressure. I don’t think they can raise prices, as it’d just open ppl to switch to Open source models.

j45 1 hour ago | parent

They are two different companies

measurablefunc 1 hour ago | parent

Selling the same product. It doesn't matter who is running the neural network, the utility derived from the neural network has nothing to do with the name of the company.

nemonemo 1 hour ago | parent

No, they sell different products in the same category. You are basically saying Google and Bing as the same product when Bing is superior to Google search in some non-critical metrics.

higginsniggins 1 hour ago | parent

Because they are? Google and Bing are the same product - search engines. Just like Ford and Ferrari both sell cars, whether you think one is "better" or not.

jejeddd 1 hour ago | parent

Stupid post. Microslop dedicated little resource to bing.

Both OAI and Anthropic are rivals throwing immense resources in direct competition in producing the best product in the SAME CLASS.

bushbaba 1 hour ago | parent

Better comparison is Pepsi vs coke or Home Depot vs Lowe’s.

derwiki 1 hour ago | parent

Folks certainly have their preferences, but I think most consider each company's roughly equivalent models to be of the same quality.

vrganj 1 hour ago | parent

I would also say that Google and Bing are roughly the same thing fwiw.

tildenpark 47 minutes ago | parent

It's more like a duopoly where the top two leaders have meaningful market share. Airbus and Boeing is more apt than Bing and Google.

yako21000 1 hour ago | parent

Like, no name of a company must or has to have anything to do with the product itself.

moscoe 1 hour ago | parent

Thanks for the insight, Sherlock

indoorfish 1 hour ago | parent

open weight, "how we trained it" is the open source of LLMs

ludamad 30 minutes ago | parent

real source is nice but boy have compile times gone up

jmspring 1 hour ago | parent

The work going on to improve things on single card like a 3090 is nuts. HyperQwen, other things. I have my subscriptions, but always good to explore options.

rao-v 37 minutes ago | parent

You have to understand that Strata and HyperQwen are giving you good looking tokens per second but are not giving you anything close to the bf16 model’s capability (they quantize, worse they quantize KV caches, they approximate expert routing etc.)

The models are so impressive that getting 70-80% of their capability can be helpful, but beware, you are using a significantly dumber model.

jmspring 28 minutes ago | parent

I have subscriptions for necessary work and even pay for api calls.

The machine with the 3090 I built years ago and suddenly it’s worth 4x plus what I paid. It is for testing, but I use the model I run on it and the model I run on an mbp M1 Max with 64gig as workers for specifically scoped work.

I’d love to have a few dgx sparcs or the like to do heavy local stuff, but that money is best paying the pimps for now.

snovv_crash 27 minutes ago | parent

Things like the hadamard rotations being applied before the quantisation mean that it has much less impact than before.

belZaah 39 minutes ago | parent

Sure, but, in absence of money, where are the open models going to come from? They take a lot of effort and resources to train. The current ones have been made in hope the growth will lead to a payoff one way or another. With the two main giants struggling and the market cooling, that payoff becomes quite uncertain.

sterlind 33 minutes ago | parent

could be stone soup. a bunch of companies pitch in to train an open-weight model, a consortium or something. I think we need a return to something like the GPL for it to work, though. otherwise companies will take a good model and post-train it without contributing.

vrganj 27 minutes ago | parent

Could be state industry projects, maybe?

Rapzid 27 minutes ago | parent

I believe Anthropic IPO is a pump and dump at this point.

seahawks78 2 hours ago | parent

Wow! Its bursting...

ssl-3 1 hour ago | parent

The subheading in the article is telling, and doesn't appear to demonstrate anything I would describe as "bursting"

> The ChatGPT maker’s latest funding round values it at $1.25 trillion, less than its $1.4 trillion target

jejeddd 1 hour ago | parent

Fear is central which eventually will find its way in the public market.

eastbound 1 hour ago | parent

It's frightening to me that single companies' valuations can vary by that much. The stock exchange is the Adam Smith way of directing the assignation of resources to the most efficient company, and it's supposed to be liquid enough to allow fine-grained decisions.

dragontamer 29 minutes ago | parent

> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

This Adam Smith?

Adam Smith was against Joint Stock Companies (aka: the predecessor to the modern company). Specifically, he believed that shareholders will never watch over the money with the same care as a merchant who watches his own money.

simonh 56 minutes ago | parent

The investments these companies are making depends entirely on the confidence that number go up, a lot, very quickly and soon.

Number go down, or even not go up as much as expected, is not good. These valuations are entirely matters of confidence. When that goes away…

27183 28 minutes ago | parent

Guess they'll just have to tighten the belt and follow through on their promise to revolutionize work, capitalism, government, and everything by building AGI. Lol. Lmao.

vatsachak 53 minutes ago | parent

That's 150B shaved off like it's nothing lol

bulbar 44 minutes ago | parent

Is there even a way to professionally decide if a company's value is 1.25 or 1.4 Trillion?

I always kind of suspected that those are somehow derived numbers, but arbitrary for the most part.

nixon_why69 8 minutes ago | parent

Its based on the price of the most recent round, if I just sold 10% for 1 million, then naively 100% is worth 10 million.

xnx 2 hours ago | parent

The end state is OpenAI as a division of Microsoft.

paaloeye 1 hour ago | parent

At this rate ANT will end up as a division of Amazon

vatsachak 53 minutes ago | parent

I mean the super groups are going to break up and make their own bands.

My only request is to keep Opus 5.5 alive

Rapzid 17 minutes ago | parent

I always pegged Apple for ANT.. But I bet Apple is going to poach talent from Anthropic post IPO after they got their payout and are ready to move on.

mathisfun123 8 minutes ago | parent

There is absolutely no timeline where Apple acquires any token provider because Apple doesn't sell tokens.

anon373839 6 minutes ago | parent

> I always pegged Apple for ANT..

Those two are very different cults. Cultures, I mean.

stuxnet79 2 hours ago | parent

How does this affect OpenAI's prospects in the next few quarters?

Unlike Anthropic, OAI does not have an S-1 to pore over. Their finances are shrouded in rumor and speculation. I can't assess how much of a death knell a ~15B financing shortfall is.

pestatije 1 hour ago | parent

oh but that's nothing... consider all previous financing episodes and the companies involved

nemonemo 46 minutes ago | parent

Nobody on the outside knows for sure, but two key signals to watch are project sunsets and brain drain.

If the rumors of fundraising difficulties are true, OAI will have to prioritize its most profitable projects, potentially slowing down new training runs and optimizing existing models for efficiency at the expense of user experience.

Insiders are also the first to sense internal trouble, so if top talent starts leaving for competitors preparing to go public, it won't bode well for the company.

danpalmer 35 minutes ago | parent

If this is being announced here, it was probably started at least a few months ago, and at that point funding was likely looking a lot more forthcoming, so it would make sense to try to raise more than is strictly necessary if the price is good. On that basis, it might not be a problematic shortfall.

minimaxa 1 hour ago | parent

Not looking very good fellas, Bot Swarm breaches, microslop laying off 27% of their workforce.

If you have a billion users and 90% + are freeloaders, you need social media style ads to support growth, which no one likes.

Plus they are all out of data training sets, they are buying zombie companies for their data.

There are dozens of distillated clones, which are getting better every release.

The only moat is expensive data centre builds with on-loan Nvidia inference and the Chinese embargo fears.

Good luck out there.

sky2224 32 minutes ago | parent

I think Microsoft laying off 60,000 people was going to happen regardless of this AI boom or even the economy being in the absolute shitter it's in right now.

When the economy was much stronger in 2018 their headcount was around 131,000 people. By 2020 that jumped to 163,000, and by 2022 it reached 221,000. I have personally heard of employees feeling like they had nothing to do.

With their current head count at around 218,000 employees (I'm excluding their Activision head count here), bringing things back down to 160,000 or so employees sounds a bit more realistic, especially given that Microsoft has not been expanding its range of products significantly. They're building out more in the spaces they're in, but they've been pretty conservative on new product launches compared to others.

brainwad 7 minutes ago | parent

MSFT isn't laying off 60k people. It's offering voluntary severance, which will have a sub-10% take-up (for reference at GOOG it was low single digits).

vedanshchauhan9 1 hour ago | parent

What else can you expect? Look the markets right now. Its bleeding. Started with China and now US.

vedanshchauhan9 1 hour ago | parent

If an open source model locally does one job correctly, lets say writing the code, then what really do we need OpenAI and Claude for? But I guess there might be some time in that.

pixelatedindex 1 hour ago | parent

That’s why the Mac mini and studio are selling like hotcakes. Massive unified memory with massive cpu performance, with a solid hardware. If I had 3-4K burning a hole in my pocket I know what I’d be getting.

tjpnz 1 hour ago | parent

You won't. It will become something you install like a browser.

brainwad 10 minutes ago | parent

The depreciation on a sufficiently powerful local machine costs more than the subscription to cloud frontier AI.

esFran 59 minutes ago | parent

The problem with AI is that, this time, nobody was caught off guard. From small startups to tech giants, everyone bet heavily on it. There are very good open-weight Chinese models, and even a French miracle. There is no winner-take-all.

So models are already a commodity, and will remain one for years. Companies must balance capex with very long payback periods against strict austerity everywhere else.

Good news for customers, BTW.

czhu12 28 minutes ago | parent

From first principles I think youre right, but also Anthropic is making something like 80% margins.

58955995959 22 minutes ago | parent

What happens when the american deepseek equivalent comes online

MisterMunchkin 4 minutes ago | parent

If you exclude all of their costs like hardware, training, $10m/engineer salaries, dojos, CEO sex islands…

lasky 52 minutes ago | parent

this is more about the supply and demand of capital in any given moment than it is about the outlook of the company.

as a litmus test: would you turn down the opportunity to buy OpenAI shares at this current valuation?

nelaggy 30 minutes ago | parent

yes

slau 13 minutes ago | parent

I’m not touching any of that stock, most likely ever.

There’s so much money that has been poured into this, with absolutely no revenue to justify it. Trillions of investments generating billions of losses.

Now they’re looking for retail and retirement funds to pay off the debt.

This is not to say that no one will make a profit; I’m sure some people are _very_ happy.

xvector 6 minutes ago | parent

This is really fascinating, I'm thinking of putting a significant chunk of my net worth into the four AI labs (biased towards Anthropic and OpenAI). It seems obvious to me that we will get superintelligence in the next 5 years, and that is a winner take all race.

c0rruptbytes 44 minutes ago | parent

it’s kinda crazy but i do think we’re seeing a turn

my company was easily spending $1m/month on tokens

sonnet 5.5 drops - we barely cracked half this month

it has to go down too, carbon is interesting, china has qwen 4 soon

coding isn’t sustainable growth - RLRVF is really effective for software development - labs are cracking the code, these models will have to get better at other things to be worth it

slopinthebag 33 minutes ago | parent

1m/month? whoever is running your company is out to lunch.

c0rruptbytes 31 minutes ago | parent

~2000 engineers with low adoption

slopinthebag 23 minutes ago | parent

1970 engineers too many

slau 18 minutes ago | parent

We’ve seen a similar drop in spend. 3-5x less for entire teams comparing September and October.

It’s not clear whether people are being more careful, or if the price per effort is in free fall.

ddk_ 34 minutes ago | parent

I thought Masayoshi Son would step in to back them?

m00dy 33 minutes ago | parent

the liquidity is drying out.

seydor 21 minutes ago | parent

The market has chosen to crown $ANT as queen.

sidcool 16 minutes ago | parent

I haven't read that article, but looking at WSJ, I'd take it with a pinch of salt. It's not a reliable source.

sidcool 15 minutes ago | parent

Why do I sense a schadenfreude here? It's like people are rooting for their failure.

analognoise 4 minutes ago | parent

Some of us truly are.