Yet another Hacker News

OpenAI raises less than half of $30B target

89 points timr 2 hours ago 50 comments

bronlund 1 hour ago | parent

No no no, don’t burst that AI bubble just yet. I haven’t finished all my side-projects.

gessha 1 hour ago | parent

Once the bubble bursts we can finally sweep up the datacenter GPUs and jerry rig them to our home servers!

Avicebron 1 hour ago | parent

I literally can't wait.

tehlike 46 minutes ago | parent

After you upgrade your electric panel and cooling.

ssl-3 33 minutes ago | parent

Winter is coming.

__m 40 minutes ago | parent

They will probably go to other data centers or company premises.

kylehotchkiss 9 minutes ago | parent

The government will just nationalize them and use all the compute for poorly defined military tasks

dartharva 1 hour ago | parent

The consumer-level services you've gotten used to will still exist no matter how hard the bubble bursts, if it ever does. Way too many players now.

dweinus 1 hour ago | parent

Sure, but you'll have to pay for what it really costs

IncreasePosts 1 hour ago | parent

Inference will keep getting cheaper and cheaper though. Perhaps model releases will be fewer and farther between because these groups can't affording paying out a billion or more in training each generation

kennywinker 42 minutes ago | parent

The chinese models are being trained for less than a million a pop.

gpm 40 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, but Wright's law (cost of making the n^th something (like a token) being exponentially less than the cost of making the first) strongly suggests that post-bubble inference will be significantly cheaper the longer the bubble lasts.

Whether that's a good thing considering the other things those dollars could be going towards...

Spivak 22 minutes ago | parent

I mean I'm happy for better but it might start grounding the industry where 1.6% better on some benchmarks doesn't justify hundred million investments.

dools 57 minutes ago | parent

I have only ever paid per token for this reason: if I can’t generate sufficient value to cover the real cost I don’t want to invest in using it

taneq 49 minutes ago | parent

I thought the incremental supply cost per token wasn’t that high, and the main expense for these companies was the training they do on top of that?

dartharva 42 minutes ago | parent

.. which will be the same you are paying today. Token prices are already above their operating costs.

If you're talking about free tiers, yes, that might change as marketing budgets will shrivel up.

simianwords 50 minutes ago | parent

Over last 3 years on HN I have seen such low quality comments : prophesizing the end of times - the bubble will burst and we will all be so happy after that.

Any tiny news article that indicates even a modicum of challenges for OpenAI will be met with slurry of such comments.

Perhaps it’s good to keep a good epistemic hygiene in all this. OpenAI isn’t going away anywhere soon. AI isn’t going away, in fact we haven’t even started yet.

anonymous908213 44 minutes ago | parent

> OpenAI isn’t going away anywhere soon. AI isn’t going away

You have conflated two completely unrelated concepts. LLMs aren't going anywhere, but what good does that do a company burning hundreds of billions to do 20% better than Chinese models trained with millions? The economics don't economic.

simianwords 40 minutes ago | parent

According to your argument, OpenAI should simply stop R and D which can result in massive jumps in performance because China may catch up?

What is your prescription if I may ask? Don’t invest in research? Let China do it?

jejeddd 22 minutes ago | parent

Can you read?

anonymous908213 17 minutes ago | parent

It's far too late for a prescription now because they're already committed to hundreds of billions in spending they don't have, but the reason Chinese companies will win the long game is because they are serious and the Americans are deeply unserious. From the beginning, Chinese labs have viewed LLMs as software tools and developed efficiently. Conversely, Americans are selling a fantasy about creating the machine god if they just throw another hundred billion at it every few months. Altman, Amodei, and Musk are all pathological liars who have oriented their entire companies around deceiving investors and marketing hype rather than engineering principles. They are unbelievably successful at what they set out to do, but what they set out to do was not to build a long-lasting foundation for success.

Spivak 10 minutes ago | parent

There's no should, only what economics incentivize. Right now we're not paying for the upfront training costs-it's great, the Millennial subsidy continues. But if, and big if right now, the infinite money font dries up and they have to recoup training investment direct from customers then that looks to be a huge price increase on the ground which makes cheap to train and good enough even more attractive than it already is.

dartharva 38 minutes ago | parent

It is the α's and Z's brigading in with their over-emotional shortsighted groupthink.

simianwords 34 minutes ago | parent

1. GPT-4.5 launch. "AI crash is gonna lead to decade long winter." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206226

2. Claude Code limits tightened. A commenter expects the bubble to pop, while arguing AI will succeed long term. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44599297

3. GPT-5 disappoints. "Teetering on the edge of a huge bubble pop." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44966583

4. DeepSeek releases a cheaper model. A commenter expects excess data-centre capacity when the bubble bursts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413548

5. AMD signs an OpenAI chip deal. A commenter predicts a bubble pop and a flood of cheap GPUs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491514

6. Discussion of AI-assisted open-source contributions. A commenter says models must improve soon or the bubble will pop. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45745326

7. Discussion of Opus 4.5 coding. A commenter advises using cheap AI tools before the bubble bursts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521192

8. GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing. "The bubble has burst." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929404

9. DeepSeek runs on one AMD accelerator. A commenter predicts a bubble pop will flood the hardware market. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166790

10. Same DeepSeek thread. "AI is overvalued, so it WILL pop." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167787

Edit: more examples

1. AI on an old CPU: coding gains don’t justify investment; bubble will burst. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938412

2. Nvidia–OpenAI deal stalls: GPU bubble, inflated demand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46834749

3. Lisp machines retrospective: AI bankruptcies and another bubble. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45990309

4. Nvidia customer concentration: AI bubble will pop despite useful technology. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41411258

5. DeepSeek open-source announcement: inflated AI valuations will collapse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43126619

6. OpenAI–AWS deal: spending commitments could bring everything crashing down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802550

7. Anthropic funding: final big push before the bubble bursts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45105333

8. Enterprise AI adoption: disappointing returns will pop the bubble within two years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025025

9. OpenAI cash burn: railroad-style bubble and massive investment downturn. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439964

derwiki 24 minutes ago | parent

OOC did you have this list prepared? You posted it very quickly as a response

red_green_yell 13 minutes ago | parent

It's a reaction to the constant drum beat of doom marketing:

- "our product is too dangerous to release but we can't be bothered to prove its capabilities working in public hacking competitions" - "our product is going to kill everyone" - "our product is going to take all the jobs" - "we have a $40T addressable market" - "in a few days AI will be able to improve itself without human intervention and it's capabilities will hocky stick to infinity!!!"

Followed by absurd financials that spin massive losses as "getting in on the ground floor" before historic profits arrive based on the doom marketing above.

No one is saying AI is going away soon). But OpenAI and Anthro will go the way of Netscape when the market finally stops blindly accepting the doom marketing. Anyone with eyes can see LLMs will create historic increase in productivity among knowledge workers AND it will be a commodity. The massive profits frontier labs need to justify valuations are not coming.

There are AI bears and AI bulls. It's easy to cherry pick extreme and clearly wrong statements from each. But if you actually believe the bears are the more extreme/wrong overall you just aren't paying attention to what the bulls are saying.

paaloeye 40 minutes ago | parent

Use Ultra mode.

bushbaba 56 minutes ago | parent

Welp that’s not a good sign for the anthropic IPO. Curious what happens now that both OpenAI and Anthropic will face budgetary pressure. I don’t think they can raise prices, as it’d just open ppl to switch to Open source models.

j45 46 minutes ago | parent

They are two different companies

measurablefunc 43 minutes ago | parent

Selling the same product. It doesn't matter who is running the neural network, the utility derived from the neural network has nothing to do with the name of the company.

nemonemo 42 minutes ago | parent

No, they sell different products in the same category. You are basically saying Google and Bing as the same product when Bing is superior to Google search in some non-critical metrics.

higginsniggins 35 minutes ago | parent

Because they are? Google and Bing are the same product - search engines. Just like Ford and Ferrari both sell cars, whether you think one is "better" or not.

jejeddd 18 minutes ago | parent

Stupid post. Microslop dedicated little resource to bing.

Both OAI and Anthropic are rivals throwing immense resources in direct competition in producing the best product in the SAME CLASS.

bushbaba 3 minutes ago | parent

Better comparison is Pepsi vs coke or Home Depot vs Lowe’s.

derwiki 34 minutes ago | parent

Folks certainly have their preferences, but I think most consider each company's roughly equivalent models to be of the same quality.

yako21000 34 minutes ago | parent

Like, no name of a company must or has to have anything to do with the product itself.

indoorfish 46 minutes ago | parent

open weight, "how we trained it" is the open source of LLMs

jmspring 5 minutes ago | parent

The work going on to improve things on single card like a 3090 is nuts. HyperQwen, other things. I have my subscriptions, but always good to explore options.

seahawks78 53 minutes ago | parent

Wow! Its bursting...

ssl-3 35 minutes ago | parent

The subheading in the article is telling, and doesn't appear to demonstrate anything I would describe as "bursting"

> The ChatGPT maker’s latest funding round values it at $1.25 trillion, less than its $1.4 trillion target

jejeddd 20 minutes ago | parent

Fear is central which eventually will find its way in the public market.

xnx 50 minutes ago | parent

The end state is OpenAI as a division of Microsoft.

paaloeye 42 minutes ago | parent

At this rate ANT will end up as a division of Amazon

stuxnet79 49 minutes ago | parent

How does this affect OpenAI's prospects in the next few quarters?

Unlike Anthropic, OAI does not have an S-1 to pore over. Their finances are shrouded in rumor and speculation. I can't assess how much of a death knell a ~15B financing shortfall is.

pestatije 37 minutes ago | parent

oh but that's nothing... consider all previous financing episodes and the companies involved

minimaxa 24 minutes ago | parent

Not looking very good fellas, Bot Swarm breaches, microslop laying off 27% of their workforce.

If you have a billion users and 90% + are freeloaders, you need social media style ads to support growth, which no one likes.

Plus they are all out of data training sets, they are buying zombie companies for their data.

There are dozens of distillated clones, which are getting better every release.

The only moat is expensive data centre builds with on-loan Nvidia inference and the Chinese embargo fears.

Good luck out there.

vedanshchauhan9 21 minutes ago | parent

What else can you expect? Look the markets right now. Its bleeding. Started with China and now US.

vedanshchauhan9 17 minutes ago | parent

If an open source model locally does one job correctly, lets say writing the code, then what really do we need OpenAI and Claude for? But I guess there might be some time in that.

pixelatedindex 9 minutes ago | parent

That’s why the Mac mini and studio are selling like hotcakes. Massive unified memory with massive cpu performance, with a solid hardware. If I had 3-4K burning a hole in my pocket I know what I’d be getting.