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OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

116 points by abdelhousni

by gradus_ad

9 subcomments

Claude Code is extremely easy to set up and use. I suspect its saturation among software professionals is at the majority of the addressable market.
What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers.
The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.

by asim

2 subcomments

Nothing is worth $852B in that space of time unless they are printing more than half of that in cash which to be clear they are not. They are burning it at that rate. Let's be clear. It's a valuable company, a valuable product, a valuable technology. It set the trend for the next phase of computer usage. But it's not worth $852B in that span of time and when it goes public that reality will bear down on them quickly.
It's a falling knife. Don't try catch it on the way down. That valuation might be justified in another 10 years.

by matchagaucho

1 subcomments

As someone working in the enterprise space with OAI, this still feels like we're in the top of the first inning.
Many teams remain anchored on equating AI with chat experiences, while a growing share of enterprise value is emerging from leasing compute clusters to run agentic workloads in containerized environments.
OpenAI has built a cloud-first architecture that supports this model. The desktop experience and applications are sexy, but enterprise usage will likely skew heavily toward asynchronous, background processing.

by Avicebron

1 subcomments

I was convinced they were going to go the openclaw or something similar route..pivoting into cybersec/enterprise makes sense if they are trying to copy anthropic, but it doesn't really telegraph any sort of differentiator

by kushalpandya

1 subcomments

The duopoly slowly turning into a monopoly won't be pretty.

by impulser_

4 subcomments

"You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?"
The ironic part about this is GPT models are by far the worst models to chat too.
I think I rather talk to a wall than GPT-5.4. It so unpleasant. I feel bad for anyone who only experience with AI is ChatGPT.

by habosa

0 subcomment

There does seem to be like a 1% chance (maybe 0.5%) that this turns into a WeWork situation. It's a product that users love, but the company leadership is so used to lying and deceiving and being loose with numbers that the IPO filing could be a pretty big shock. Either they'll have to tell the truth, which will be much less rosy than the lies, or they'll lie and turn everyone off.
Probably won't happen. But not definitely.

by cal_dent

0 subcomment

just maths. if they're as a capable as each other then x product cannot be worth multiples above y unless there's a clear USP. Arguably OpenAi's is brand recognition but given Antrhopic's recent growth that's less certain than a quarter ago

by jmyeet

0 subcomment

I don't believe that either Anthropic or OpenAI are going to survive the AI valuation crunch. Google, Meta and Microsoft will because they're not AI-only companies. There are four reasons why I believe this:
1. I honestly don't think that AI is all that useful for anything other than suppressing labor costs and I don't expect that to change in the short to medium term;
2. I really don't think Anthropic or OpenAI can ever satisfy their stratospheric valuations. I foreesee no cash flow possible that will arrive quick enough to make that happen;
3. Hardware costs will devalue the trillions invested in AI data centers. By 2030 the GPUs will probably be at least 3x as good. Bear in mind, it's just over 4 years between the 3090 and 5090 and that's 3x TFLOPS; and
4. China or other actors will make sure that proprietary LLMs won't be dominant. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow. China in particularly won't want a US tech company to dominate this space. The increasing RAM in local, relatively cheap computers will make this more and more viable.
Bonus prediction: I think China will be making their own homegrown NVidia equivalent GPUs on homegrown EUV by 2030.

by hooch

0 subcomment

For some reason the latest Claude Desktop release from Anthropic threw off its Claude branding and charm to chase after bland Codex Desktop app look and feels.
Maybe they think OpenAI is doing something right?

by fraywing

10 subcomments

What happens if OpenAI collapses at this point? Is it just too big to fail given defense contracts and Microsoft?
The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively.
Anyone seeing differently?

by jmye

1 subcomments

It’s an absolutely hilarious/absurd valuation for a company that has absolutely no path to do anything other than lighting money on fire, forever. I’d call it nonsense, but Tesla’s valuation proves the market runs on shenanigans, at this point, so whatever.
If people want to meme OpenAI into a trillion dollar market cap, I guess let them?

by NewsaHackO

1 subcomments

Ah yes, the weekly "ChatGPT is definitely going to fail, for real!" post, with absolutely no substance whatsoever. Still, they know it will definitely be on the front page, regardless. Make sure you subscribe to their pub!

by SpicyLemonZest

4 subcomments

> "You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" an early backer of OpenAI told FT. "It's a deeply unfocused company."
This is exactly the dynamic I've been worried about.
If you go to OpenAI's site to learn what they're all about, they're pretty clear about it: "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity", "Join us in shaping the future of technology". They think and I agree that ChatGPT is great, but the future of humanity does not depend on precisely how successful this one consumer chatbot is, and so it is not the company's focus. Anyone who understands OpenAI at even a basic level would recognize this, it's neither new nor subtle.
I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that OpenAI investors do not understand OpenAI and are just revenue growth junkies.

by rvz

0 subcomment

So now they are realizing that they are indeed in a bubble and OpenAI was extremely overvalued?
Anthropic is also overvalued. Their revenue is not even recurring. It’s now “Annualised Revenue” due to token spend.
These two companies are just vehicles of a pump and dump scheme. OpenAI is already off loading shares with “acquisitions” that do not make any sense because investors already think they are about to IPO and not worth the price.
Also, one more thing… and it is called Deepseek.