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Analyzed from 7385 words in the discussion.
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#ipo#openai#market#money#more#companies#anthropic#don#public#still
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 7385 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (337 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
It's not unreasonable at all, it's a honest description of the hotel's current situation. Would you call it profitable?
If a hotel stays on the building stage for half a decade, getting a loan after another to pay for that, that unprofitability is acutely relevant.
Eh... what's left to build? Actual AI?
... but they did it in a place and culture filled with people who would probably sell their own mothers into slavery if they were allowed to provided it increased the valuation of their startup, so here we are.
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"
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.
https://models.dev/?search=deepseek-v4-flash
Investment is not basic math. Its also dependencies to US companies, trust etc.
We’ve all seen how the “math” on so much of the AI business sector literally doesn’t check out, and here there are: still ballooning, still making deals, still directly crafting laws through political influence, still taking over damn near every user space.
Politics at a high enough level lets you play a different game with different rules.
Politics at a low enough level lets you do the same actually, but we usually call that civil unrest, guerrilla warfare, or collective action depending on how many of which group is defying which “rules”.
It’s very easy to get used to the guardrails and guidelines around us when they persist and succeed for decades, but they are much more fragile than they appear.
That's any machine that can physically host the weights and context. You'd need a highly-specced machine for better performance and throughput, but it's not a requirement as far as literally executing the model and getting output.
My recollection is that retail investors end up losing in these situations. I'm personally staying away...feels too much like a grift, but I won't pretend I have some magical analysis to prove it.
Banks make money by giving out loans is a meme, but it's actually true here. You kind of need collateral to do that, but a stock of a company which has revenue is a perfectly cromulent collateral even by strict standards. It's not even some infinite money glitch - it's kinda how the whole system is supposed to work.
The stock market is largely about betting on expectations of future value while money is just a token which is used to settle things. E.g. if you think about simplified mechanics of IPO, say, investor Alice buys OpenAI shares, OpenAI gets the money and Alice has shares. If for simplicity we assume that Alice and OpenAI use same bank and there are no intermediaries, then it literally just updates two cells in a database. And Alice now has shares which is an asset of known value, thus can be borrowed against, etc. Also, say, OpenAI can use that money to repay debt, then perhaps lender would buy SpaceX stocks - it's not like money was withdrawn from the system.
Of course, there can be some interference: multiple companies do IPO around same time it would reduce FOMO, and if they did it literally in one day there might be lack of liquidity.
The only next step is the public market.
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...
Shiller PE is near 44. Japan had an equivalent price to earnings ratio of over 70 during their 1989 bubble.
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.
Knowledge Atlas Technology (Z.ai): 57B
MiniMax Group: 26B
Deepseek: 45B (rumored)
That's surprising to me; I thought (or heard) that it was low 3-digit millions.
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.
Kind of a radical idea. I did read about that in economy books way back when at uni... but I don't think it's really happening actual. At least my walled doesn't seem to get it.
PS: it's a joke, free market works when there is competition. VCs are making damn sure it's just enough monopolies that they get wealthier while consumers themselves get milked. Without antitrust actually being enforced, there is no free market.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-consumer-go...
Splendidly interesting times.
But I recently added POET, CBRS and similar. I think whatever happens, "shovel sellers" will be the main winners in this bubble.
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 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.
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.
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.
This might be less fun than you imagine.
There's laws and shit about that. You can't just immigrate to a country illegally.
That’s at least my generalized perspective.
And I don't see what you are seeing on the rest of BRICS.
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.
If anything, Russia is a prime example of inefficient allocation of resources.
(And China is a state capitalist economy)
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)
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.
Enron entered the chat.
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).
But it gets worse because when the lock-up period expires in 180 days after ipo (currently scheduled right before quarterly index rebalancing), it's possible that frees up more than 20% of float and it suddenly has to be weighted at the full 100% of market cap -- triggering additional automatic buying.
It certainly seems like it's set up for our retirement accounts to be the insider's exit liquidity.
In your scenario, that 100% cap would by definition be less than 5x float so it shouldn't trigger any more buying than the lock-up expiration itself did.
Are we now suggesting people get out of index funds?
Worse, will this and spacex ipo destroy the index funds?
- 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
Care to explain the mechanics? I’m an investor (both in passive and more active vehicles) and don’t understand what you mean.
I am sure nothing bad will happen
Nay, it is not just “ok”. It is imperative that you diversify if you want a strong and resilient portfolio.
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
Will they eat each others potential capital appetite? Or is there just that much laying around for them all to gobble up the bag?
EDIT - but that's just the IPO, I wasn't even thinking about how much insiders will want to sell after the lockup ends...
I would invest in OpenAI or Anthropic or both but I doubt I'd invest in SpaceX.
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.
Edit: Or has so much somehow changed in two weeks that it’s no longer necessary to wait until next year?
We’re about to have 3 of the worlds’s largest corporations be massively in the red.
https://www.ft.com/content/a67248e7-f819-4dba-b0f7-3847df0a7...
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.
Even third world doesn't have this much shameless and corrupt regime as much as this one is.
Whatever terms fancy you, the underlying reality remains the same.
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).
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.
Both Altman and Dario have consistently said inference margins are high.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/openai-de...
They’re all down significantly from the date of going public.
I don’t really see how the price of OAI et al can go up - it’s already richly priced! The only way is down imo. But how much?
Considering how much they were priced a year ago even dropping 20% wouldn’t be bad… it’d be bad for insiders if the drop prolongs prior to the lock up period which is long enough to cause an even steeper drop. Also depending on the float - any non public trading shares face an illiquidity discount.
I would postpone on the very last minute, depending on what my competitors numbers say :-D
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?
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
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.
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+
"Be fearful when others are greedy" — Warren Buffett
If this isn't a greedy market, I don't know what is. Also what does it mean for the stock market to 'take off' when it's been doing ATHs for a while despite the geopolitical turmoil? Even /r/wallstreetbets has more sensible takes than this.
Shouldn't we at least be a little bit scared already when shoe companies pivot to AI and their stock goes up ~750%?
* 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...
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.
So there's still hope that the bubble pops before the funds are poisoned.
https://www.etfstream.com/articles/spacex-to-ipo-on-nasdaq-a...
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.
Mythos Marketing.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The hype will be a lot less if Anthropic IPOs first and beats OpenAI’s numbers.
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).
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.
If it did, I'd be a lot richer than many of the mainstream startups.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
According to what metrics does Anthropic have the better product?
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!
No CAPTCHA, no DDoS on blogger, works where archive.md is blocked
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/openai-is-preparin...
For those who don't use Javascript and prefer text-only
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA23F0Pt...
For example, something like