Maybe this is a dumb take but I don't think they'll ever go public. Their company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that I don't think it makes sense to go public at all.
In its current state the economics of the company make little sense to me. The astronomical costs to execute a prompt versus the relatively tiny price tag to the customer smells like an Enron scandal to me except everyone knows it and we’ve accepted it. Wall street is less forgiving.
Isn’t one of the reasons to go public to raise capital? They seemed to be doing that just fine without the weight of the open market with extremely profitable companies like Nvidia funneling billions of dollars in.
I was just thinking of this today. AI is pretty much precisely a Theranos style grift, but unlike Theranos, who were shooting for something outright impossible, Dario and Sam may be running the biggest "fake it till you make it" success story of all time. Because like Professor Harold Hill they came through in the clutch at the last possible moment, and produced a band that could kinda play music, enough to win enough faith and goodwill to fund the next round. That kind of good fortune is going to be worth untold billions if not trillions, and it's gonna make a lot of programmers butthurt because their hopes of getting in on the ground floor and being a "founding engineer" in the next Silicon Valley unicorn are dashed forever, because the Valley doesn't need them anymore. Just a business bro and enough compute to generate the operations for the business.
It adds liquidity for sure, and the option to actually exit. But the implication in these posts is often to exit a bad investment on the back of an ignorant public, explicitly stated in this post.
I have not gotten good numbers on the real inference costs, its kind of annoying. Most comparisons are with the API costs, where we have no idea how profitable it is.
How much does it cost to execute a prompt in your estimation vs. the cost to the customer? Even being a DeepSeek provider is profitable so long as you have utilization and the AI provides mostly have high utilization.
In the "volatile and unstable" scenario that you're replying to, the $BILLIONS from cashing out while it's a hot market is a more sure way to have long-term influence on things.
Altman owns significant personal stakes in core technology, chip, and energy infrastructure sectors. His job is to hype AI so that the companies that supply the infrastructure behind it increase in value. When OAI becomes insolvent because their business model doesn't work, he can jump ship with no losses or liabilities.
It really doesn't matter. They're doing secondary offerings for employees and individual holders, and they'll have no issue allowing private transactions for larger holders.
The general wealth distribution has shifted to the point that they do not need access to public funds, and frankly, if they can't find private funds for their needs, it is a huge red flag that they would just be dumping on the public.
The problem with secondary offerings is that it means that someone in the private markets winds up holding the bag. It is in the best interests of insiders to have the public holding the bag if and when things go south. Even if you don't believe it will ever go south, the profits OAI would need to generate to justify the investment the private markets have flooded into OAI are absolutely gargantuan, and they are generally not built to sit around for multiple years collecting distributions. They need to return money to their LPs, and soon.
The "private market" at this point is so huge though that you'll have an "insiders" private market, and an "outsiders" public market to dump the bag on that the insiders don't care about.
Dumb question (I should just sit down and watch rest of the movies, I've only seen the first one): can you explain the "matrix vibes" you're referencing. Spoilers are fine.
I recently watched Matrix 1, 2, 3. Matrix 1 is amazing - if you feel called to rewatch it - watch it, and enjoy it. Might be better than how you remembered. I made the mistake to watch Matrix 2 and 3. Honestly, I suggest you just DON'T. I have not seen Matrix 4, and don't plan to. Best of luck!
I like Gaben's take on going public. This is a clip from a longer talk he gave which I think is really insightful into many aspects of the economics of software and company culture.
It's a great discussion, but not one that I think applies to AI startups. Valve's business model takes the traditional path where profit is generated by selling a product and growing from there. Modern Startups now take large sums of upfront funding, trading them for equity to hopefully reach profitability. Going public becomes a pressure from investors to recoup their cost, not a strategic move based on business needs. An unfortunate reality
Prices are moving inference to highly profitable, oAI seems to have solved their training problems, and they're currently competing nicely with Anthropic on the coding side. I'd wait, too -- why fight this stuff out in public when you can stay private and have your big competitor deal with all the public company concerns? There's plenty of capital available in the private markets for them right now.
I believe he's saying "Citation Needed" - It does seem the opposite is true, while maybe token cost is going down, frontier models use a lot more, so it's no an accurate gauge of cost. Trying to find any chart of token cost, I found this which looks like inference cost is going up: https://tokenpriceindex.com/ . Of course frontier models are becoming far more useful, but if you're claiming prices are becoming highly profitable then are you saying this increasing price is actually able to cover server costs now? My understanding it was still sold at a loss. And token price increases have turned major companies off the hyper use they tried out early in the year, using it more sparingly. I don't doubt it'll be a solid business, but it's not shaping out to be the hugely scalable business openai promised.
Companies that plan to go public don't push back their IPO dates if things are going well. It's a universal sign that the finances aren't in order when a company pushes back its IPO multiple times.
OpenAI and Anthropic are barely profitable on a "unit" basis when ignoring the costs of marketing and other COSS expenses. They're definitely not profitable on an EBITDA or GAAP basis or they'd already have IPO'd.
"I would say not 2026, yeah. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do."
Why is this even a "would say" kind of thing. Surely AGI - they've achieved it three times now, right? - has lead to a datacenter full of PhDs who will perfectly time the IPO.
It doesnt matter if you trust them or not. I don't know why people get so hung up on this. Blind trust is for children and the only certain things in this world are death and taxes.
The point is that openAI is currently messaging against IPO in 2026. That is news by itself
The time to go public was about 16 months ago. People are waking up to large bills now, Chinese models are nipping at their heels, public sentiment has turned, money is becoming more expensive.
The market no longer cares about fundamentals, corporate structure, controls etc.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 3.4 ms ] threadIsn’t one of the reasons to go public to raise capital? They seemed to be doing that just fine without the weight of the open market with extremely profitable companies like Nvidia funneling billions of dollars in.
Have you heard of $TSLA before?
We've seen multiple times how "Wall street" is an exit for insiders, with retail investors left holding the bag.
The general wealth distribution has shifted to the point that they do not need access to public funds, and frankly, if they can't find private funds for their needs, it is a huge red flag that they would just be dumping on the public.
unless the public is clueless
edit: which I doubt btw. investors are going to want to dump the bags very soon
Either OpenAI fails, and goes nowhere.
Or it succeeds, in which case IPOing will be a quaint aspect of history.
People really aren't following through on what it means for any of these companies to succeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvS-IwYFCP4
I hate to wave the Wikipedian protester sign, but...
Anyway, any evidence for "prices are moving inference to highly profitable" because they are still selling $20 for $1 with their subscriptions.
OpenAI and Anthropic are barely profitable on a "unit" basis when ignoring the costs of marketing and other COSS expenses. They're definitely not profitable on an EBITDA or GAAP basis or they'd already have IPO'd.
Why is this even a "would say" kind of thing. Surely AGI - they've achieved it three times now, right? - has lead to a datacenter full of PhDs who will perfectly time the IPO.
The point is that openAI is currently messaging against IPO in 2026. That is news by itself
The market no longer cares about fundamentals, corporate structure, controls etc.
Too slow by my judgment.