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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
P/E is not an indicator of available to deployed capital. Just in the EU alone there is about €12 trillion in bank deposits which could be invested. There is no lack of liquid capital to be invested.
Basel capital rules are supposed to mitigate against the insane idea of banks deploying all their capital in a single high risk stock.
If you think you can get all the _public_ to pull their short term bank deposits into stock .. well, (a) you've not met the Germans, and (b) that is how the economy of Albania collapsed in a pyramid scheme.
There is the amount of capital which is technically available, and the amount of capital which is available in practice.
If EU depositors want exposure to US AI firms, why didn't they already withdraw their money to invest in Microsoft/Google/etc.? I'm a bit doubtful that an OpenAI IPO is going to trigger major shifts in asset allocation.
> 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.
Wasn't there a Chinese ai startup that got bought recently but the government wouldn't let the founders leave china? I think stuff like that would have an effect on valuation
We prefer red blooded American scam artists here, buddy. Hell, Elon probably found some bullshit way to recognize Chinese AI as Twitter revenue, used to buy cyberattacks to sell to SpaceX.
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).
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.
I still think NVIDIA is a bad bet--where is their moat in the long term? Doesn't the sort of work NVIDIA engineers do look vulnerable to AI-assisted automation? NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
I admit I'm not too knowledgeable about the semiconductor industry. But it seems to me that there two likely scenarios: AI Bear or AI Bull.
In the AI Bear scenario, NVIDIA is obviously overvalued.
In the AI Bull scenario, we get full automation of software engineering. With "just a few clicks", an AMD employee can extract and replicate whatever subset of the spec is needed for AI workloads. Didn't the Google vs Oracle case find that copying an API can be fair use? And NVIDIA's patents haven't stopped Google from training on TPUs have they?
Prices for both companies are already very forward looking, and assume best case scenario of insane growth for at least a decade while assuming no risk or competition.
But tech is also one of the fields that is more prone to disruption.
Nvidia is consistently one product away from it's competitors to eat highly into their margins.
Google may have a stronger moat. No company in Italy I'm aware of is using anything but copilot or Gemini/notebooklm (talking legal, insurance, etc, not tech) because they are natural extension to the cloud and Microsoft 365 existing plans.
Recency bias seem to push investors to ignore those risks and plenty reason like you: they use recent hindsight to project future growth.
I have a suspicion that when China will roll out their NVIDIA capable chips - and that is a question of when, not if - NVIDIA stock will plummet as it is heavily overvalued atm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't you think sitting alone at home smoking weed and playing games might get a little bit lonely? Humans need human contact. Might as well pick up a night shift at the convenience store so you can talk to people.
That's something I have at the back of my mind. My company is completely dysfunctional so 90% of my job is literally doing nothing, which is amazing. The problem is the fear of losing this position.
Nah, it's just a small-scale form of wealth redistribution. The poster takes themselves out of the job market (making way for someone else), and then goes and spends their IPO money at a favourable exchange rate overseas. Literally everyone wins (versus the poster hoarding money and holding a lucrative job).
Sure. If everyone became software engineers then we'd have 8 billion IT staff and zero food production, which would lead to the extinction of human race by mass hunger.
I'm not sure what's exactly your point besides "if everyone does exactly the same thing, then society collapses".
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.
Russia has allocated a significant proportion of its resources to exterminating its own children.
China has done well, but the rest of the BRICS categorization makes no sense to me. India (and also Pakistan) are behind China on renewables but are having a huge surge right now.
That being said, it does look like it's being partially subsidized by Elon burning lots of money. We'll see if he can keep it up or if it will be left behind as hardware evolves.
> its June quarter sales could reach at least $10.9 billion
It COULD reach $10.9 billion. It COULD also completely shit itself and go bust. We'll just all have a fun time finding out together, won't we, investors?
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)
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).
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.
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.
Agreed. The mere "mass" of these companies dampen any movement that the underlying asset has. I mean, in a earning call it might just be a line item in the "Others" section. And even if they made/lost billions it is a small % of the quarterly profits of such companies.
Index funds buy companies, for the most part, according to their market capitalisation.
They own more of bigger companies than small.
There's the option of "equal weight" or other strategies but the overwhelming majority is market cap weighted.
Index funds are also really, really big now and contain a lot of money earmarked for retirement/pensions.
In theory if you had a temporarily very frothy market into which you could sell a part of your unprofitable company to some people at a very high valuation, index funds would then mechanically move in and need to purchase and add significant support for insiders to sell into.
In this case, Elon has moved the wildly unprofitable XAI into SpaceX. SpaceX will IPO with a trillion dollar valuation, while only releasing a small number of shares for public trading.
Due to the high valuation, index funds are required to buy SpaceX stock, which Elon will presumably slowly sell them in order not to crash the stock. The funds will be left holding the stock, while eventually the price will crash, because the company will simply not make enough money to justify the valuation.
> Elon will presumably slowly sell them in order not to crash the stock. The funds will be left holding the stock, while eventually the price will crash, because the company will simply not make enough money to justify the valuation.
Musk owns about 50% of SpaceX. You are saying he is planning to sell the vast majority of that holding at a gradual pace that will not be noticed by anyone but fast enough to get a high price?
I'm sure there are multiple ways to profit from the situation. Even having just a small fraction of the shares publicly traded, while the index funds keep the price high is a huge win for him, as his net worth will be extreme on paper.
Ok, but how does this "hold the bag for the oligarchs"? And which specific oligarchs do you have in mind when you say this? Are you thinking of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Elon Musk?
Index funds will prop up the valuations of these companies, while they return nothing but value on paper. The owners on the other hand can use the valuation as collateral to loans, which then generates cash for them. Musk and Altman would be the most visible benefactors of this scheme, yes.
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
Sure, if you want to print a 1000 page supplement and staple it to your taxes.
More seriously, I would still worry about order execution and transaction costs. You are likely to end up on the wrong side of the bid/ask spread when playing against the big boys.
If you're actually serious about this, you might as well start your own ETF. Or just buy this one I found after a quick Google: https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/spxt Buying multiple sector-specific ETFs is another approach. I'm told that utilities are good to hold during a downturn.
In some countries (like Switzerland) you don't have any capital gain tax __unless_ you are a professional investor. What makes you a professional investor? One of the things that can elevate you to that status is the amount of trades you make.
So I am sure this is not viable for many people as buying an ETF counts like 1 trade, but investing the same money in the underlying assets count like 10s of trades.
It’s a thing but your order execution won’t be as efficient as an ETF, so you will be losing a non-negligible amount each year in slippage from the large number of small transactions
> It’s a thing but your order execution won’t be as efficient as an ETF, so you will be losing a non-negligible amount each year in slippage from the large number of small transactions
Not necessarily
ETF managers execute block trades outside the normal market, sometimes through dark pools, not even reported to the public.
Fidelity, Vanguard, etc ask JPMorgan, Goldman to execute these block trades and pay them a fee. This fee can exceed the “slippage” a retail investor can face.
It is very true what they said. In an ETF you get both bad stocks and good. You have no choice.
If you diversify manually you can pick and choose only the crème de la creme
But… people love to be lazy or just aren’t knowledgeable enough to pick their stocks themselves and thus it is safer for them to just stick to broad strokes of an index fund.
For starters as basic portfolio, you could 1:1 an index fund but take out all the garbage from it and keep only the strong, bright future companies.
ETF are just noob introduction to the stock market and great one at that but to maximize returns you want to be more specific and intentional about your picks.
Where etfs are great even after you learn a lot, is exposure to whole sectors of the industry. That’s how I treat them: one - etf - an index of how a particular industry fares.
Source: I basically live solely from investments at 30
If that were true, then one would expect a competitive fund that does just that and that give higher ROI than an S&P 500 index fund (or index ETF) when you consider expense ratio. What is a such a fund? Or, alternatively, can you point us to a comprehensive list of those companies you would exclude from the index to get superior returns?
My returns are around 20 percent per year for years. I lack will and energy to list everything I owned but it’s basically a method of value investing + momentum trading so two opposites. You could say it’s a diversification of investing philosophies.
Honestly it’s a free for all game so no one has any interest to share their secrets and methods. When you lose money I make money. Better player wins.
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.
People usually use the term for poorer countries, as opposed to the rich ones. Originally third world meant those not aligned with the USSR or NATO, I believe.
I get the meaning of "third world" but the USSR hasn't existed for decades, is China the modern equivalent? And it wasn't made clear why a neutral country like Switzerland would be expected to be highly corrupt while Russia would be low in corruption. Or indeed why Switzerland would be seen as a country in the process of becoming financially rich.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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...
Personally, I don't worry about profitability in the short term. If Anthropic is adding $15b ARR every single month, and their gross margins are 50%+ (per Dario), profits are inevitable.
The thing I'm most worried about with SpaceX is bundling X.com, xAI with it. I don't want to invest in X.com nor xAI.
Lastly, I don't my money tied to the Elon rollercoaster.
I understand very little of this, but hasn't OpenAI burned so much money, which it now need to be recouped, making any profit short or long term is mostly a fantasy.
If OpenAI IPOs, then investors will expect a return. OpenAI can't generate that, so they'll be forced to slash R&D, stop datacenter roll outs and layoffs, so what's left? A model that will grow stale in six month, massive commitments and debt?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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+
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.
> * 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.
This just isn't true. Banks never offload commercial debt to non-bank entities at a discount unless they're under financial duress or they believe the loss is worth more than keeping the debt on the books.
> Investors expect more such moves as banks come up against risk limits that restrict their exposure to individual borrowers or sectors, and seek to free up balance sheet for more lending.
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.
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…
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.
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.
>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.
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.)
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.
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.
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"
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.
> So I take it you're going to buy shares of OpenAI on opening day then? ;)
Probably not. Do you understand however that your comment does not make sense in the context of my comment?
> 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)
It also doesn't mean nothing - you have to go and analyze any given stock to make these kinds of claims on a per-IPO/equity basis. You also are ignoring traders and trading algorithms run by... big institutions and trading firms, and you're not accounting for volume or accounting for post-IPO purchases nor breaking those down by segment. In other words, you're just making stuff up.
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'.
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.
I have no personal skin in the game in terms of investment posture, but OpenAI is, by an increasing margin, the weakest player. Claude and Gemini are both blatantly better (better as in smarter/more capable across all measures). Claude seems like the ‘smartest’ model and while Gemini is way more annoying to interact with in terms of its sycophantic nonsense and brain rot writing style, Google also has unlimited compute and I’ve literally never run out of tokens using any of Gemini’s models. And meanwhile Anthropic is seemingly addressing its biggest weakness, which is limited compute, by basically taking over from Grok’s computer hardware (I half expect Grok to get discontinued any day now - it sure seems like xAI has accepted that Claude is the front runner and they’re just getting behind it, kind of like what OpenAI agreed to do if they ever got behind in the AGI race back in ~2017).
So what does OpenAI even lead at? Name recognition because they were first? At some point they were supposed to be specialising in medicine but I notice no difference between Gemini and ChatGPT when it comes to medical questions or analysis.
My prediction is OpenAI will be the first big one to go bankrupt or be acquired, which is also probably why they are rushing this IPO: gotta get the founders cashed out.
Somewhat of an aside, but I have no idea if AGI is actually possible with LLMs, but Claude is the closest thing to a person that I’ve used (even if it has its moments of abject retardation - not unlike humans, I guess).
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Since the source code leak of Claud Code, is there an actual believable moat whatsoever any longer?
I’m not nearly an expert at any level, but it seems to me the models themselves are converging on “good enough” for coding, with the real differentiator being the harness and tooling.
From a bystander and casual user perspective it all seems running as fast as it can to commoditization to me.
I’m certainly the dumb money here so won’t be investing short or long for any of these. But I do find it interesting!
The Claude Code client source was never their moat. There are plenty of other companies with equivalent tools (gemini cli, cursor cli, augment, codex, etc.) The models that it talks to are far more important.
Not to say you're wrong about commoditization. I don't think these companies will be able to raise their prices and keep them there to make enough money to keep building models like they've been doing.
I disagree, Claude harness is the majority of its added value imho. I still use old Claude models over free models for the chain of thought and execution capacity, when free models have largely reached Sonnet 4.5 level and even surpassed it.
Non profit files for IPO should be the headline.
Technically they are not profitable
nonprofitable ex-non-profit seeks profit via AGI (A Giant IPO)?
No because they are not a non-profit since 2025.
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.
“For-Profit ClosedAI” would work too
For-Profit Non-Profitable Closed-AI company called OpenAI
An unprofitable non-profit.
Un-profit for short.
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"
> 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.
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.
Isn’t knowing how to scale and optimize llm traffic the main barrier ?
That's just a "more hardware" problem.
Right, and who has more hardware?
Happily, they are building and selling more hardware all the time!
China. They make them there. Huawei is catching up too.
Yes, OpenAI bought all the DRAM.
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.
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?
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.
>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...
The M2 money supply is ~4x higher now than in 1999. Does that indicate there is a lot more runway now, than then, at least on that metric?
P/E is not an indicator of available to deployed capital. Just in the EU alone there is about €12 trillion in bank deposits which could be invested. There is no lack of liquid capital to be invested.
Basel capital rules are supposed to mitigate against the insane idea of banks deploying all their capital in a single high risk stock.
If you think you can get all the _public_ to pull their short term bank deposits into stock .. well, (a) you've not met the Germans, and (b) that is how the economy of Albania collapsed in a pyramid scheme.
There is the amount of capital which is technically available, and the amount of capital which is available in practice.
If EU depositors want exposure to US AI firms, why didn't they already withdraw their money to invest in Microsoft/Google/etc.? I'm a bit doubtful that an OpenAI IPO is going to trigger major shifts in asset allocation.
> Can public markets go higher? Shiller P/E is closing in on the peak of the dot-com bubble:
Shiller PE is near 44. Japan had an equivalent price to earnings ratio of over 70 during their 1989 bubble.
Hm, wasn't Japan's bubble in part due to easy credit? Are we going to see easy credit in the US given recent memories of inflation?
Quite possible that there will be a Trump effort to drive down rates and abandon inflation control for political reasons.
> 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.
Meanwhile Chinese AI companies outputting open weight models nearly as good are valued in the low single digit billions. Go figure.
Current chinese AI company valuations (USD):
Knowledge Atlas Technology (Z.ai): 57B
MiniMax Group: 26B
Deepseek: 45B (rumored)
> Meanwhile Chinese AI companies outputting open weight models nearly as good are valued in the low single digit billions.
That's surprising to me; I thought (or heard) that it was low 3-digit millions.
Wasn't there a Chinese ai startup that got bought recently but the government wouldn't let the founders leave china? I think stuff like that would have an effect on valuation
That's the premium for being a Western company in a Western market, yes.
They are dirty communists.
We prefer red blooded American scam artists here, buddy. Hell, Elon probably found some bullshit way to recognize Chinese AI as Twitter revenue, used to buy cyberattacks to sell to SpaceX.
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).
Don't worry, the Fed can create infinite money!
It's good that there is now a new head of Fed for this.
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.
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
Yep. Two simple boring bets on AI: NVIDIA and Google.
I still think NVIDIA is a bad bet--where is their moat in the long term? Doesn't the sort of work NVIDIA engineers do look vulnerable to AI-assisted automation? NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
AMD should have been ideally placed to compete with them, and haven't.
> NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
The spec is the value. And the patents.
I admit I'm not too knowledgeable about the semiconductor industry. But it seems to me that there two likely scenarios: AI Bear or AI Bull.
In the AI Bear scenario, NVIDIA is obviously overvalued.
In the AI Bull scenario, we get full automation of software engineering. With "just a few clicks", an AMD employee can extract and replicate whatever subset of the spec is needed for AI workloads. Didn't the Google vs Oracle case find that copying an API can be fair use? And NVIDIA's patents haven't stopped Google from training on TPUs have they?
They will exist, but at what valuation? Can NVIDIA really continue to raise?
Google is a lot more recession proof than NVIDIA is my intuition here
Prices for both companies are already very forward looking, and assume best case scenario of insane growth for at least a decade while assuming no risk or competition.
But tech is also one of the fields that is more prone to disruption.
Nvidia is consistently one product away from it's competitors to eat highly into their margins.
Google may have a stronger moat. No company in Italy I'm aware of is using anything but copilot or Gemini/notebooklm (talking legal, insurance, etc, not tech) because they are natural extension to the cloud and Microsoft 365 existing plans.
Recency bias seem to push investors to ignore those risks and plenty reason like you: they use recent hindsight to project future growth.
I have a suspicion that when China will roll out their NVIDIA capable chips - and that is a question of when, not if - NVIDIA stock will plummet as it is heavily overvalued atm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't you think sitting alone at home smoking weed and playing games might get a little bit lonely? Humans need human contact. Might as well pick up a night shift at the convenience store so you can talk to people.
At which point the plan becomes something you can put into action tomorrow, if you wanted. It's like the parable of the Mexican fisherman: https://www.thekinnardhomestead.com/the-parable-of-the-mexic...
Stoner WoW addicts working dead-end jobs live better than kings did in previous centuries, and we're too status-obsessed to notice this.
That's something I have at the back of my mind. My company is completely dysfunctional so 90% of my job is literally doing nothing, which is amazing. The problem is the fear of losing this position.
You could spend some of that 90% time building skills for hobbies / a hypothetical future job search.
But why?
If I manage not to get fired for 12 years then I'll reach the endgame.
> and then smoke weed and play video games until the end of my days.
This might be less fun than you imagine.
> I'd spend a year in Japan just to see what it's like
There's laws and shit about that. You can't just immigrate to a country illegally.
That's such a cynical take. If everyone does what you're describing, we will never make progress as a society.
I can think of lots of people that would make society better if they would do that instead of what they are doing now.
Nah, it's just a small-scale form of wealth redistribution. The poster takes themselves out of the job market (making way for someone else), and then goes and spends their IPO money at a favourable exchange rate overseas. Literally everyone wins (versus the poster hoarding money and holding a lucrative job).
Progress towards what? Do you think "progress" as conceived by sillicon valley billionaires aligns with the type of life you would like?
There's a non-trivial chance "working hard" as defined by the modern ethos is doing more damage than good.
You're not less cynical here
It’s not cynical, but it is overly consumerist.
I cannot imagine having untold amounts of money only to do nothing afterwards except consume the stuff put in front of you.
€2M isn't "unfold amounts of money"
It's enough for a modest retirement.
Sure. If everyone became software engineers then we'd have 8 billion IT staff and zero food production, which would lead to the extinction of human race by mass hunger.
I'm not sure what's exactly your point besides "if everyone does exactly the same thing, then society collapses".
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.
Russia has allocated a significant proportion of its resources to exterminating its own children.
China has done well, but the rest of the BRICS categorization makes no sense to me. India (and also Pakistan) are behind China on renewables but are having a huge surge right now.
Including Russia and BRICS doesn’t support your thesis. Nothing efficient about their resource allocation
(And China is a state capitalist economy)
Russia is incredibly isolationist which makes it categorically different to the other BRICS
Anthropic actually turned an operating profit recently due to huge revenue growth.
Do you have a source for that claim?
Hmm, it looks like if their revenue doubles to ~$10B and their expenses don't, they stand to gain a very sweet ~$500M.
https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-nears-first-quart...
That being said, it does look like it's being partially subsidized by Elon burning lots of money. We'll see if he can keep it up or if it will be left behind as hardware evolves.
> its June quarter sales could reach at least $10.9 billion
It COULD reach $10.9 billion. It COULD also completely shit itself and go bust. We'll just all have a fun time finding out together, won't we, investors?
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)
The bubble either pops or it gets bigger. We've survived worse, better it pops now.
WCGW… Companies with $500B+ valuation don’t bancrupt…
Enron entered the chat.
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.
Soon to be part of your portfolio if you hold Nasdaq 100 or S&P 500 trackers line QQQ or SPY.
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).
"free-float adjusted" is the key term
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.
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.
Agreed. The mere "mass" of these companies dampen any movement that the underlying asset has. I mean, in a earning call it might just be a line item in the "Others" section. And even if they made/lost billions it is a small % of the quarterly profits of such companies.
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?
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
Destroy is a strong word. Rather, it will make the pension funds and passive investors the bag holders for the oligarchs.
> Rather, it will make the pension funds and passive investors the bag holders for the oligarchs.
Care to explain the mechanics? I’m an investor (both in passive and more active vehicles) and don’t understand what you mean.
Index funds buy companies, for the most part, according to their market capitalisation.
They own more of bigger companies than small.
There's the option of "equal weight" or other strategies but the overwhelming majority is market cap weighted.
Index funds are also really, really big now and contain a lot of money earmarked for retirement/pensions.
In theory if you had a temporarily very frothy market into which you could sell a part of your unprofitable company to some people at a very high valuation, index funds would then mechanically move in and need to purchase and add significant support for insiders to sell into.
In this case, Elon has moved the wildly unprofitable XAI into SpaceX. SpaceX will IPO with a trillion dollar valuation, while only releasing a small number of shares for public trading.
Due to the high valuation, index funds are required to buy SpaceX stock, which Elon will presumably slowly sell them in order not to crash the stock. The funds will be left holding the stock, while eventually the price will crash, because the company will simply not make enough money to justify the valuation.
> Elon will presumably slowly sell them in order not to crash the stock. The funds will be left holding the stock, while eventually the price will crash, because the company will simply not make enough money to justify the valuation.
Musk owns about 50% of SpaceX. You are saying he is planning to sell the vast majority of that holding at a gradual pace that will not be noticed by anyone but fast enough to get a high price?
I'm sure there are multiple ways to profit from the situation. Even having just a small fraction of the shares publicly traded, while the index funds keep the price high is a huge win for him, as his net worth will be extreme on paper.
Ok, but how does this "hold the bag for the oligarchs"? And which specific oligarchs do you have in mind when you say this? Are you thinking of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Elon Musk?
Index funds will prop up the valuations of these companies, while they return nothing but value on paper. The owners on the other hand can use the valuation as collateral to loans, which then generates cash for them. Musk and Altman would be the most visible benefactors of this scheme, yes.
So these extremely risky companies will become a big part of American retirement funds.
I am sure nothing bad will happen
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
Upside of robo advisors?
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.
> 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.
Oops wrong comment
This is terrible advice, are you buying and self balancing hundreds of different stocks?
I can’t say I’ve tried this but the thought just came to me that generating such trades would be trivial to do monthly now.
Sure, if you want to print a 1000 page supplement and staple it to your taxes.
More seriously, I would still worry about order execution and transaction costs. You are likely to end up on the wrong side of the bid/ask spread when playing against the big boys.
If you're actually serious about this, you might as well start your own ETF. Or just buy this one I found after a quick Google: https://www.proshares.com/our-etfs/strategic/spxt Buying multiple sector-specific ETFs is another approach. I'm told that utilities are good to hold during a downturn.
In some countries (like Switzerland) you don't have any capital gain tax __unless_ you are a professional investor. What makes you a professional investor? One of the things that can elevate you to that status is the amount of trades you make.
So I am sure this is not viable for many people as buying an ETF counts like 1 trade, but investing the same money in the underlying assets count like 10s of trades.
Direct indexing is a thing.
It’s a thing but your order execution won’t be as efficient as an ETF, so you will be losing a non-negligible amount each year in slippage from the large number of small transactions
> It’s a thing but your order execution won’t be as efficient as an ETF, so you will be losing a non-negligible amount each year in slippage from the large number of small transactions
Not necessarily
ETF managers execute block trades outside the normal market, sometimes through dark pools, not even reported to the public.
Fidelity, Vanguard, etc ask JPMorgan, Goldman to execute these block trades and pay them a fee. This fee can exceed the “slippage” a retail investor can face.
You don't have to do the large number of small transactions, you know? Just diverge from the index, it's fine!
It is very true what they said. In an ETF you get both bad stocks and good. You have no choice. If you diversify manually you can pick and choose only the crème de la creme But… people love to be lazy or just aren’t knowledgeable enough to pick their stocks themselves and thus it is safer for them to just stick to broad strokes of an index fund. For starters as basic portfolio, you could 1:1 an index fund but take out all the garbage from it and keep only the strong, bright future companies.
ETF are just noob introduction to the stock market and great one at that but to maximize returns you want to be more specific and intentional about your picks.
Where etfs are great even after you learn a lot, is exposure to whole sectors of the industry. That’s how I treat them: one - etf - an index of how a particular industry fares.
Source: I basically live solely from investments at 30
If that were true, then one would expect a competitive fund that does just that and that give higher ROI than an S&P 500 index fund (or index ETF) when you consider expense ratio. What is a such a fund? Or, alternatively, can you point us to a comprehensive list of those companies you would exclude from the index to get superior returns?
My returns are around 20 percent per year for years. I lack will and energy to list everything I owned but it’s basically a method of value investing + momentum trading so two opposites. You could say it’s a diversification of investing philosophies.
Honestly it’s a free for all game so no one has any interest to share their secrets and methods. When you lose money I make money. Better player wins.
> My returns are around 20 percent per year for years.
That's unbelievable! Even Warren Buffet only makes 19% - 20% compounded every year. That would make you one of the top investors ever.
> Even Warren Buffet only makes 19% - 20% compounded every year. That would make you one of the top investors ever.
Not really.
Plenty of hedge funds and HFT firms make 40-100% each year (before fees) over 30-40 years…
Citadel’s “stock picking ability” is 40% annual returns since 1999
They just don’t advertise this because it’ll make retail traders and passive ETF investors really sad
Lots of people think they can do better than the index funds. Some do, for a while.
Ah, the old trick: "I would simply pick the good stocks".
I prefer the casino.
return on the average stock is -2% iirc, terrible idea
I can't wait to invest an OpenAI and lose all my retirement fund.
Anthropic is also a suitable choice.
And SpaceX, of course.
Allbirds, most potential
A race to lock in the money next to SpaceX (which just filed an S-1)? This can't go well.
I am starting to speculate that was the purpose of the openai lawsuit. Delay IPO.
Maybe Sams reaction to Elons ego?
Reporting is going to be interesting. I wonder how their filings will look like and what will appear there
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?
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.
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.
Yeah it’s a scam
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.
Don't worry - they'll make it up with volume!
Compound effect… compound red numbers? /s
Anthropic said they’ll be profitable by q2 of this year.
https://www.ft.com/content/a67248e7-f819-4dba-b0f7-3847df0a7...
In my mind, if they believed that they would IPO now, and not still be courting investors (which I believe they are still doing).
i say i'll be a millionaire by the end of this year.
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.
What is the third world in 2026?
"Developing nations" if you will. Like these days banks are referring to labour class as "low quality human capital".
Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.
> "Developing nations" if you will
I wouldn't, I'm not sure which nations are developing or that they're developing into. Aren't we all developing all the time?
> Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.
That's great, could you just explain the underlying reality without the loaded terms then?
People usually use the term for poorer countries, as opposed to the rich ones. Originally third world meant those not aligned with the USSR or NATO, I believe.
I get the meaning of "third world" but the USSR hasn't existed for decades, is China the modern equivalent? And it wasn't made clear why a neutral country like Switzerland would be expected to be highly corrupt while Russia would be low in corruption. Or indeed why Switzerland would be seen as a country in the process of becoming financially rich.
> 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).
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.
They say that the CFO isnt ready for public scrutiny and deny her access to the accounting.
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.
Given the nature of private conversations, I suppose there is no source to this claim?
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.
Sarah Friar, the CFO, took both Nextdoor and Block public.
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
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?
Maybe they need those accountants to buy stock first before they put them all out of work?
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?
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...
Is 100+ FPE the new normal?
The valuation just needs to be high enough to get into an index, then the 401K plans start buying the shares automatically.
Must be retail investors believing: big number == good.
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.
Isn't SpaceX the only one of those that actually makes money?
Personally, I don't worry about profitability in the short term. If Anthropic is adding $15b ARR every single month, and their gross margins are 50%+ (per Dario), profits are inevitable.
The thing I'm most worried about with SpaceX is bundling X.com, xAI with it. I don't want to invest in X.com nor xAI.
Lastly, I don't my money tied to the Elon rollercoaster.
I understand very little of this, but hasn't OpenAI burned so much money, which it now need to be recouped, making any profit short or long term is mostly a fantasy.
If OpenAI IPOs, then investors will expect a return. OpenAI can't generate that, so they'll be forced to slash R&D, stop datacenter roll outs and layoffs, so what's left? A model that will grow stale in six month, massive commitments and debt?
Can't wait to see where they stick the cost frontier model updates in the P&L. Maybe some kind of NRE they can amortize so it's outside of EBITDA?
seems unlikely as it owns twitter and grok, both being giant money sinks
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?
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.
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.
Let's hope—and I say this with zero sarcasm—that their relationship to Wall Street is cruel indifference.
Cool does this mean they'll disclose their revenues and expenses in line with GAAP?
yes, they will.
That will be interesting, to say the least
Will it be a WeWork moment? I hope so, I want some comedy gold (I cannot afford the mineral kind).
Expect ⅕ codex quotas after
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.
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.
Trying to get your money out while there's still time! Quickly now!
Can't wait to see those revenue numbers.
OpenAI reported ~$20 billion annualized revenue for 2025, up from $6 billion the year before.
And that covers their model training and infrastructure costs?
each new model brings in revenue that is multiple times the cost to create said model
Is that the case? What about gpt 4.5? o1-pro?
with revenue >2x cost, they can afford to have a miss now and then
If you have a machine that reliably takes $1 and makes $2 you raise debt not equity
care to elaborate? if my machine is doubling my money, why do I have to raise debt?
Presumably there is some time component, i.e you need to use the machine quickly or risk losing it.
Also, it's better to double $2 instead of $1, and then pay back that $1.1 and end up with $2.9 instead of $2.
But it was a more facetious comment than I would have preferred to make, I actually went to delete it but you got in too quickly.
There are many reasons it's wrong, too, eg. at some level of risk debt becomes more expensive or impossible
But the intent of the comment was to say that if you owned as sure a thing as the GP proposed you'd do what you could to avoid selling parts of it.
So their CFO's publicly voiced concerns are unwarranted?
The efficient market hypothesis has taken a real beating in the age of tech industry anti-gravity valuations.
until it doesn't.
scaling laws are a power law, you can only stay ahead for so long when each minor improvement gets exponentially more expensive
exactly
I’m less interested in revenue and more interested in their operational costs
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.
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.
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...
Cool so will they release revenue and expense numbers in line with GAAP?
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?
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.
Sam is a power monster. He'd probably commit suicide before intentionally retiring and stepping away from influencing affairs.
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
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.
> 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+
At issue here is specifically the AI bubble, though, not the broad market.
> 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%?
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...
> * 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.
This just isn't true. Banks never offload commercial debt to non-bank entities at a discount unless they're under financial duress or they believe the loss is worth more than keeping the debt on the books.
Concentration requirements can apparently cause this.
Let me dig up the FT article I read about this.
Here's the article: https://www.ft.com/content/08aba5e4-5834-4e79-a48d-989a2c5ba...
And this quote:
> Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-.... https://www.ft.com/content/08aba5e4-5834-4e79-a48d-989a2c5ba...
> Investors expect more such moves as banks come up against risk limits that restrict their exposure to individual borrowers or sectors, and seek to free up balance sheet for more lending.
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.
Congrats to OpenAI and RIP to the SF housing market
we are approaching end of the party.
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…
This is what exponential growth in a limited world looks like.
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.
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...
Ouch, I wasn't aware it got shortened so much! Yep, this is truly terrible.
lol, they reduced the wait time drastically last year I think it's a few weeks now.
I wonder if this means solid 10% yearly returns from SP500 is finally over..
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.
>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.
> How you go from 380 to 900 billions in a month, I am very curious?
Mythos Marketing.
Well having "Mythos" at our offices (maybe not so good but 90% or maybe even better) would it be worth 1 Billion, Just saying!
Are they trying to beat SpaceX as well?
Say OpenAI IPO 5 times fast
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.)
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.
Wise comment. 25 years working in PE showed me that retail investors are how you pay off losses.
Yeah, and now the you shall not buy this bullshit begins. And then the price soars. :D
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.
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...
> It's absolutely true.
What is absolutely true? I'm not sure specifically what you are referring to.
> Just look at how private equity is now getting access to public markets and retirement accounts[0].
Nobody forces you to reallocate your Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund or wherever you have your retirement assets into a new Apollo fund.
Secondarily, we should treat people like adults and allow them to make their own investment decisions.
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.
> So I take it you're going to buy shares of OpenAI on opening day then? ;)
Probably not. Do you understand however that your comment does not make sense in the context of my comment?
> 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)
It also doesn't mean nothing - you have to go and analyze any given stock to make these kinds of claims on a per-IPO/equity basis. You also are ignoring traders and trading algorithms run by... big institutions and trading firms, and you're not accounting for volume or accounting for post-IPO purchases nor breaking those down by segment. In other words, you're just making stuff up.
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'.
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.
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.
I have no personal skin in the game in terms of investment posture, but OpenAI is, by an increasing margin, the weakest player. Claude and Gemini are both blatantly better (better as in smarter/more capable across all measures). Claude seems like the ‘smartest’ model and while Gemini is way more annoying to interact with in terms of its sycophantic nonsense and brain rot writing style, Google also has unlimited compute and I’ve literally never run out of tokens using any of Gemini’s models. And meanwhile Anthropic is seemingly addressing its biggest weakness, which is limited compute, by basically taking over from Grok’s computer hardware (I half expect Grok to get discontinued any day now - it sure seems like xAI has accepted that Claude is the front runner and they’re just getting behind it, kind of like what OpenAI agreed to do if they ever got behind in the AGI race back in ~2017).
So what does OpenAI even lead at? Name recognition because they were first? At some point they were supposed to be specialising in medicine but I notice no difference between Gemini and ChatGPT when it comes to medical questions or analysis.
My prediction is OpenAI will be the first big one to go bankrupt or be acquired, which is also probably why they are rushing this IPO: gotta get the founders cashed out.
Somewhat of an aside, but I have no idea if AGI is actually possible with LLMs, but Claude is the closest thing to a person that I’ve used (even if it has its moments of abject retardation - not unlike humans, I guess).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Market can stay irrational longer than..
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Them filing will burst the bubble.
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.
What war? We've been assured the war is over, and we already won! Multiple times...
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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.
I’d take the Kalshi bet for far less than 2.5tn
What do you think it will end up as?
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?
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
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.
Tesla used to be a kind of “ethical” play. They made electric cars cool.
Tesla is still doing that. The CEO is a shithead but that's a different matter.
>Anthropic has the obviously the better product
According to what metrics does Anthropic have the better product?
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.
Since the source code leak of Claud Code, is there an actual believable moat whatsoever any longer?
I’m not nearly an expert at any level, but it seems to me the models themselves are converging on “good enough” for coding, with the real differentiator being the harness and tooling.
From a bystander and casual user perspective it all seems running as fast as it can to commoditization to me.
I’m certainly the dumb money here so won’t be investing short or long for any of these. But I do find it interesting!
The Claude Code client source was never their moat. There are plenty of other companies with equivalent tools (gemini cli, cursor cli, augment, codex, etc.) The models that it talks to are far more important.
Not to say you're wrong about commoditization. I don't think these companies will be able to raise their prices and keep them there to make enough money to keep building models like they've been doing.
I disagree, Claude harness is the majority of its added value imho. I still use old Claude models over free models for the chain of thought and execution capacity, when free models have largely reached Sonnet 4.5 level and even surpassed it.