OpenAI is closing in on raising $6.5B. Largest VC raise in history (opens in new tab)

Number of earlier stories on same "closing in" topic:

OpenAI Fundraising Set to Vault Startup's Value to $150B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41514954

And even earlier

OpenAI in Talks for Funding Round Valuing It Above $100B

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41514954

You are already late.

I'd be very surprised if Microsoft wasn't one of the investors.

I legitimately get their names mixed up, and have had a hard time in occasion wondering why open ai would be controlled by someone who seems to really like doing fraud.

Exactly.

The only difference between the two is that one has a business providing a useful service to millions and millions of people.

The bigger the raise, the more news and hype, the easier it will be to offload the stock to retail investors. Theres definitely a sweet spot here where I assume the large funds will want retail investors to start picking up the losses instead of them. I don't see this as a long path till IPO like Stripe or SpaceX but I could be wrong

The losses will just get bigger and bigger, and eventually there will be an appetite for retail investors to pick up the tab

The financial industrial complex will make money on transaction fees selling the stock to their clients, institutional or otherwise. They don't need it to actually succeed in the long-term - as it is the clients, people's money, on the line, e.g. incentives aren't aligned properly.

AGI will buy back the company.

At this point I don't think they see it as an investment, but rather as securing a previous investment. They aren't looking for a return on the 6.5B, but rather as a deployment of strategic capital to secure their previous investment.

A large amount of AI funding seem FOMO driven. Companies aren't seeing large returns on AI stuff, they are afraid of being left behind if somebody finds some sort of use for it.

Why couldn’t it IPO? People would certainly invest at this valuation.

In what way is GPT-5 missing? They never announced a release date, did they? And we had the o1 release just a couple of weeks ago, so why wouldn't they take more time working on improving GPT-5?

Beating all other models in latest benchmarks by a wide margin with a completely new approach, while having the only properly working audio chat with transformer isn’t enough? Not to even mention SORA if actually comes out someday.

I’m not an OpenAI fanboy but come on, credit where it’s due, they have so far been one step ahead of the competition from the start on every front.

I do research in other ML topics but I do follow the qualitative leaps they are pulling off continuously so far.

6.5B is only 200k H100 chips

The best iPhone of all times!

Same category of headline...

Not today, but I have a feeling that 3 years from now things will look very very different.

Gemini is also very cheap and comparable and works well as a drop in replacement for OpenAI models.

For me, Llama is definitely not good enough yet. At least, the one I can host isn't.

They're racing to AGI.

Of course he's greasing his own wheels. The question is whether the investors will reap any benefits and whether Altman makes OpenAi profitable

Do they have anything to show for it?

By "reached into his own pocket," you mean he leveraged engineering resources from Twitter, and then once it became clear that Grok wasn't a competitive model, raised $6,000,000,000 in capital from VCs and sovereign wealth funds [1] to pay for the additional compute necessary?

[1] https://x.ai/blog/series-b

> In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through speculation on overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.

They just need one more set of people past them to buy it. I know lots of uninformed people that would jump on it thinking they are “getting in early”.

OpenAI is looking more and more like a Ponzi scheme ego play from sama. They'll find ways to offload the losses to retail investors and everything valuable will end up in Microsoft's pocket in the end.

I'm not sure how relevant that is at this stage. Not loo long ago I read that OpenAI had ~$2B revenue, but are still losing money.

At this point I'd say this is a faith investment that either LLM/GenAI use is going to explode, and OpenAI is going to get a significant share of that, or that OpenAI will achieve a much more powerful and valuable AGI.

It seems corporate evaluation/adoption of GenAI is still early stages, and not at all clear who the winners are going to be if there is a lot of revenue forthcoming. How does OpenAI complete with free models from Meta, or open source ones, or pricing strategies from giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon?