OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

podgietaru

"This is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and deployment strategy." I am so sick of AI writing.

rvz

No mention of "AGI" this time. Since we all knew it was a scam. But this is the most damning of them all: > The OpenAI flywheel is simple. More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow. FTX had a "flywheel". It fell off. Being saddled with hundreds of billions of debt makes this situation ten times worse.

aanet

> The OpenAI flywheel is simple. More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow. That gives us the ability to reinvest and deliver intelligence more efficiently to consumers, enterprises, and builders around the world. -x- In short, the musical chairs are still playing... Keep on walkin' round, y'all, till the music stops. /s

nemo1618

I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...? At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.

_diyar

Are there any Polymarket / Kalshi bets on the over-under for the price? I wonder when the music will stop.

brcmthrowaway

Wow. I doubt Anthropic can raise that. Are they more efficient, can they do with less?

railgunmerlin

didn't they just raise last month?

strongpigeon

This has to be just an extension of their previous raise, right? This was a month ago: https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

podgietaru

I can't help but think building an "everything" app is so.. both unbelievably ambitious, and a folly. I am not personally convinced that people want all the things that this super app purports to do. I am from a generation that still sits behind a desktop computer when making "big purchases." I can't even buy a flight on my phone. I am so much less likely to want to have an AI agent do that for me. Then the idea that daily consumption of these products will drive people to use them more at work... I have a very different life outside of work. My use of AI outside of work is exceedingly different to what I use it for at work. I sometimes feel wildly out of touch. But sometimes I view this as the VR moment. To me there are some things that I think may always be preferable to do outside of that ecosystem. And for me, a lot of tasks that 'agents' enable are small enough or important enough that I want to do them myself. I don't think I'll ever be comfortable allowing an agent to call me a taxi, or order food on my behalf. Because the convenience of asking for food isn't worth the chance it'll mess up, and opening an app and looking at a menu is simpler. I also think we're coming to a moment where we can start identifying the markers of AI generated content on sight. And I think there's a growing animosity to it. I might be comfortable asking AI something, but when I am looking for or searching for other content, seeing AI content markers make me angry at this point. To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd.

sixtyj

> Within a year of launching ChatGPT, we reached $1B in revenue. By the end of 2024 we were generating $1B per quarter. We are now generating $2B in revenue per month. They raised $122B. 122 / 12*2 = 5 years to get your money back (I simplify, I know revenue <> profit) They are so big that almost no one can afford to acquire them. It is similar as someone would like to acquire MSFT or AAPL. WCGW?

samdjstephens

> The broad consumer reach of ChatGPT creates a powerful distribution channel into the workplace They mention this line in different forms a couple of times in the article. It’s clear they’re pretty rattled about Anthropic’s momentum in enterprise, I wonder how confident they really are in this rationale.

oulipo2

They are trying very hard to convince themselves that it's going to work, when we see all the models plateauing... it's clearly hitting the ceiling

avaer

This announcement completes the betrayal of their founding principles. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." - Not advancing digital intelligence - While locking people into a superapp - Because they are further constrained to generating financial returns

ltbarcly3

They have to focus on the distant future (where they are frankly unlikely to exist) because they are falling further and further behind in the immediate future. Their latest desperate bid for relevance is a plugin for Claude Code that uses Codex as a second opinion. Please clap.

alyxya

> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor invested at.

pmdr

The only thing that's really accelerating is how fast you get rate-limited on ChatGPT.

mrdependable

Funny how quickly they have become like every other tech company. There is basically no hint of OpenAI the non-profit anymore. Edit: Why did this go from their press release to a news story?

joaohaas

> This is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and deployment strategy. iykyk

rishabhaiover

> We are now generating $2B in revenue per month What??

snoren

Money has lost all meaning in tech. 122 Billion raise! This is some kind of dream.