Comment by ahmedhawas123
1 day ago
So OpenAI is running at a $13B ARR, meaning this is a ~23X valuation. I don't have a good read on margin.
But this would imply massive growth assumptions which I struggle a bit to understand where they come from.
(1) New customers new to AI or migrations from Claude/Perplexity/Google: The overwhelming majority of people already know about the offerings, leaving most new people to come from residual people who identify Plus/Pro as a worthy service (can't imagine this will be huge). OpenAI can be better than their peers for certain use cases but not sure it will drive massive growth
(2) API: If anything, my bet here is that price squeezing will continue to happen until most API services are dirt cheap / commoditized
(3) New consulting services: What's the differentiation here? Palantir and many consulting companies have been doing this for years and have the industry connections, etc
Not sure what I'm missing here, I like to not subscribe to the bubble thought but having a hard time merging the reality of running a business to the AGI-implied valuations
Tech people and their friends are like 1% of the population.
Go out on the the street of Anytown in any western country, and people know "ChatGPT".
A friend of mine is a teacher, and told me that at a recent school board meeting there was discussion about implementing AI into the learning curriculum. And to the board, "AI" and "ChatGPT" were used interchangeably. There was no discussion of other providers or models, because "AI" is "ChatGPT".
That's why OpenAI has these huge projections. When average people are asked to reach for AI, they reach for ChatGPT.
> When average people are asked to reach for AI, they reach for ChatGPT.
No, average people are nowhere near that tech-savvy. Just because every mom in the 90s called every video game console a "Nintendo" did not mean that Sony didn't mop the floor with Nintendo in that era. This isn't brand loyalty, it's brand genericity. Other than, say, Replika-style users who have formed an emotional bond with a certain style of chatbot, no average joe on the planet gives a damn whether the LLM powering their chat is provided by OpenAI or Google or etc. They'll use whatever's in front of them and most convenient, and unlike Google, Apple, or Microsoft, OpenAI doesn't own the platform that establishes the crucial defaults that nearly no user ever changes.
Except Open AI happen to be the Sony in this case. 700M Weekly active users and the 5th most visited site on the planet, with no-one else close. I mean, it's pretty clear this is less 'Nintendo' and more 'Google'.
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Exactly, it's hard to dismiss the broad penetration of ChatGPT in the general population. I was an AI skeptic/luddite until almost exactly a year ago when, in a span of a month or so, I had three different friends/family members who work in various administrative jobs tell me that they all used ChatGPT surreptitiously at work to get things done. Now a year later I don't know many people that don't use it at least occasionally. The ones that don't are older and I'm confident eventually they'll be using it like crazy to annoy me.
Anecdotally, "skype" was once synonymous with video calls but it's pretty much never used now.
It's literally never used now, because it was taken offline earlier this year.
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> because "AI" is "ChatGPT".
People still call it "Kleenex" when they're using any old facial tissue. They may still call it "ChatGPT" when it's coming from Google.
They may be satisfied with anyone’s “ChatGPT” though.
More than just tech people on X and they all know Grok.
I imagine Meta users know Llama too?
Facebook users do not know Llama anywhere near the degree the X network does Grok, and both are pallid in comparison to Chatgpt.
Information retrieval for consumers is an existing high margin $250B/year business at a minimum (search ads revenue). That market is being disrupted before our eyes. That's 20x right there. There's going to be fierce competition and OpenAI is by no means guaranteed it, but surely they have more than just a puncher's chance.
The ad-monetized consumer market is funny in that they tend to be winner take all. Nobody can compete on price, because the ads go where the users are, and the users don't pay. And preferences are sticky, after making a choice, the users don't switch just for incremental improvements. So
The software development industry is likewise well in the process of being disrupted. LLMs for programming market seems to have grown from nothing to >$10B in a year. And the software development market is hundreds of billions / year, if you just consider the employment costs. We don't know exactly how this will play out, but again there's at least an order of magnitude more growth available there.
The above two are just the places where the impact is already obvious and it's clear that we don't need to assume any additional increase in capabilities. But an increase in capabilities seems really likely. Even if it turns out that we're right now on the cross-over of the sigmoid, and the asymptote won't be ASI or even AGI, a large proportion of knowledge work is also at risk. And then the addressable market is trillions if not tens of trillions.
I know this is hand-wavy, apologies for that. Doing this kind of analysis properly is both hard work and would require specialized data sources. But I think that's the general intuition for why high valuations for frontier labs are justifiable (and the same justification for bigtech capex). It's a lottery ticket with good odds for redistributing existing markets, as well as another set of lottery tickets for some set of probable markets, though we don't know exactly which.
With AGI or ASI, the addressable market is all economic activity, and at that point basically anything is justifiable.
Ads. They're going to sell ads. It's a bit hard to imagine how else they justify the valuation.
Even if people look for answers from ChatGPT instead of Google, most people still won't pay $20/mo for it, let alone $200/mo. Average people don't pay for Google search and I've never seen any sign telling they would be willing to pay for it.
But they choose products suggested by Google or OpenAI, and manufacturers already pay these companies a lot of money. AI will force us, it will manipulate us. It already chooses what we see in online stores for us. This will continue.
Regarding point (2), My brother told me that openai had some exclusive contracts with companies where they could only use openai api and I don't think that they would really switch now, because I think switching would be hard.
Regarding point (1), OpenAI created 2 amazing trends which (though I hate OpenAI, Should be called ClosedAI) took internet by wild
First when chatgpt 3 was launched
And now when image ability of chatgpt was launched with the ghibli trend.
So Honestly, I had seen so many comments on r/localllama saying that openai has become just an infrastructure company or something and then openai dropped the new image update and now they are commenting about local ai's by pasting images generated by that new chatgpt ...
I am not sure but see, google makes most of its money using advertising & data basically.
I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing sudden shifts of AI or started getting ads in AI somehow too.., because people trust AI and its a landmine of money really...
So OpenAI's 27x evaluation without any thought of ads or some data selling isn't that bad because they still got some nice engineers. The only Disgrace is the fact that they went from a non profit to an american psycho esque corporation saying "well OUR AI will take over jobs, but it was good for the shareholders in the short term though"
Do they have exclusive APIs? I thought more or less everyone had the same interface and switching might be almost as easy as changing the endpoint.
Given how many players are in this space, I am incredibly dubious that anyone will win. Market is going to be sliced between multiple big companies who are going to be increasingly squeezed on margin. Unless someone can produce some magic that is 10x more reliable, consumers are going to price compare. Today, all of the options can occasionally produce brain dead output -why pay a premium?
Especially bad for OpenAI, because they have no fallback revenue. Microsoft and Google can subside their offerings forever to eliminate competition.
23X revenue multiple is not an expensive valuation for something growing well over 100% YoY, even by public market standards let alone venture capital valuation.
Yah but is that growth really an ARR or 1-2 year revenue considering AI capability growth across players, open weight / source models, and inevitable price wars?
Do you really think there's competition?
I don't see anyone on the even in the 30 on this list: https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/top-free-apps/36
We are still at the very start of seeing AI integrated into products and industry use cases. Even if AI capabilities stop improving and Altman's dreams of replacing workers don't pan out there is enormous economic potential here.
How much of that OpenAI can capture is an interesting question. But right now APIs for open-source models are commoditized while similarly capable proprietary models can charge ~3x the price. If the flagship models run on similar margins the API offering has decent profit margins. And if we stay in a triopoly (Anthropic, Mistral, OpenAI) it's certainly possible that profits stay high. It wouldn't be the first industry where that happens
The problem is open ai's deal with the devil (microsoft) where they own a copyright to all the models that open ai produces until AGI. So what is the moat driving that $300B valuation?
Sometimes the bet is not on the company but the industry. If you can argue the industry has room to grow 10x in terms of market cap, which is possible, then merely staying even in market share is a 10x growth.
Ai applications have not even scratched the surface, IMO. I don’t think it is unreasonable to see a world where, when AI gets strong enough to do senior level white collar work, like doctors or lawyers, AI companies build sub-companies to capture the end value of their AI products rather than the base value as a vertical integration tactic.
We are at a lull but AI value add is real and the ways that AI companies capture that value add is still very primitive.
They are already growing massively right. I saw the user growth from May was up massively. So it’s not much of an assumption of something changing, just a continuation of the same.
I guess my broader point is that there will undoubtedly be a bunch of churn as these models advance and a pricing war takes place. Specially if the open models continue to advance at a similar rate (e.g., Llama, Deepseek, Qwen)
We've seen this in many industries where it's a duopoly / oligopoly or even more players where margins get really squeezed
Think about how much money openai could make _just_ by getting referrals for agentic work flows (ie: help me plan my vacation).
The thing that people are missing is that openai is a platform like google's, and there are a million different businesses they can expand into.
Sure, but I think the question is who will win the domain specific use cases (delivery, not API). Delivery of the agentic workflows is up for anyone to win (players like Perplexity, Lovable, etc) and OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic is in a way only a vendor to that by providing what will become a commoditized function calling API/MCP provider.
Open AI has 10 times the active users of any of it's competitors, including google.
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You can just ask chat GTP to help you plan your vacation.
> The thing that people are missing is that openai is a platform like google's, and there are a million different businesses they can expand into.
That should make it easy for them to choose one and start already, then. I wonder why they haven't started. /s
They have started. Their strategy is just for others to build it on top of their platform. And not build one, but hundreds of businesses. Much faster way to grow. Why retain 100+ internal product/integration teams when you can have 100+ external teams that will pay you and do the building, the trying and failing, in each niche.
The things that actually work out you can just buy or outcompete later. But that is another phase, perhaps 1 decade from now. Right now it is about starting alll the snowballs.
Exactly my point! They're up against thousands of founders who are moving on domain specific use cases faster
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It's not about the products or revenue probably. It's about its stocks. Nvidia market cap is 4.262 Trillion dollars and for META it's $1.9T (in the six place among the tech companies). After the IPO, OPAI is guaranteed to be among these stocks, so 300B is pretty cheap today.