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Comment by cadamsdotcom

10 days ago

Hoping SoftBank gets a return but I fear it’s too large a round too late in OpenAI’s lifecycle.

Maybe I lack vision. What would it take for OpenAI to join the ranks of trillion dollar companies?

SoftBank is usually a precursor to the bubble bursting. I’m more worried about the AI bubble bursting now than I was an hour ago.

  • SoftBank Group is not always known for the most sound funding, they did invest in the "Stargate" program that hasn't seen a whole lot of action.

Sure, why not? After all, Bitcoin is worth $1.6 trillion, and I have a much harder time rationalizing that.

  • I have no problem with bitcoin valuation. It isnt a company intending to create revenue. It is a relatively arbitrary store of value, not an expectation of utility.

    Openai would need 15 Billion in profit of 15 billion per year for a P/E of 20 with zero risk, or a 10% chance of 150 Billion profits per year.

    Alphabet is about 100B earnings per year. Do you think Open AI has a 10% chance of being bigger than google? it doesnt have a moat, but I guess google doesnt either, it just dominates its market.

> What would it take for OpenAI to join the ranks of trillion dollar companies?

Some kind of market advantage at the dominant price point?

  • The price point in the long term is the cost of electricity to run your model locally and the amortized cost of buying some hardware that can run it. The fact that it isn't streamlined today doesn't mean it won't be in X years.

    Investors are blindly banking on everyone perpetually going to the theater to see the talkies and missing the vision that we'll all have TVs shortly thereafter...

SoftBank sounds familiar… weren’t they a major investor in WeWork? With such poor investing acumen, why haven’t they gone bankrupt yet? Perhaps the $40 billion raised by OpenAI can only be spent on services from SoftBank’s other investments? Do investors ever restrict how their investments are spent?

  • I'm not exactly a fan of their investment choices but WeWork was a tiny blip in the portfolio of SB's speculative tech investment arm