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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
If someone comes in and points out a bunch of valid similarities, are you going to start being nice, or are you just going to call that person's ideas stupid too?
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.
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.
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)?
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.
No because they are not a non-profit since 2025.
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.
It's not "there will be", there already is a market of generic providers and you can use millions of tokens of DeepSeek-v4-flash for like 1 dollar.
https://models.dev/?search=deepseek-v4-flash
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.
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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.astralcodexten.com/p/you-have-only-x-years-to-es...
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anthropic actually turned an operating profit recently due to huge revenue growth.
Do you have a source for that claim?
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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).
5% of 2T would be $100B, not $100M.
"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.
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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.
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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.
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This is terrible advice, are you buying and self balancing hundreds of different stocks?
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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.
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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?
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!
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Anthropic said they’ll be profitable by q2 of this year.
https://www.ft.com/content/a67248e7-f819-4dba-b0f7-3847df0a7...
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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?
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> 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?
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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?
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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?
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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.
Reporting is going to be interesting. I wonder how their filings will look like and what will appear there
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
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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.
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?
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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...
Trying to get your money out while there's still time! Quickly now!
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=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+
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> 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.
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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.
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If someone comes in and points out a bunch of valid similarities, are you going to start being nice, or are you just going to call that person's ideas stupid too?
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...
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lol, they reduced the wait time drastically last year I think it's a few weeks now.
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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?
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...
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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.
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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.
Say OpenAI IPO 5 times fast
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.
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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.
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