> The large gap between OpenAI’s $852-billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion has investors rushing to grab equity in the latter before it rises, according to Augment co-founder Adam Crawley.

Interesting, so there are a lot of people still eager to invest in valuations of well greater than a-quarter-trillion, but OpenAI's latest raise has sucked up all the oxygen for enthusiasm of that valuation going even higher.

Which could be a "dumb money" move ("competitor number lower, already-big-number is scary") or a "smart money" move ("Anthropic is gaining position-wise, and currently is lower valued, let's bet on the one we think is better positioned") or some mix of both.

OpenAI just raised a shit-ton so clearly there is plenty of money out there who don't think there's a bubble or even a blown opportunity there. But the wider community doesn't think they have the competition in the bag, while still being willing to invest in big-AI-cos at absolutely enormous valuations.

If local hardware/models get good enough to take 80%-90% of what people use subscriptions for today... hoo boy. Big-AI is a bet I wouldn't be confident placing billions on. Unless your horizon is more "wait for IPO or next raise or positive news, then get out ASAP" than "hold for 5+ years."

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chasd00 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Did OpenAI really “raise” that much? The startup world is not my area of expertise but I remember reading language in the announcements that implied those dollar amounts where more of a conditional promise of money in the future instead of a check today.

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conception 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah if they sold 1/800th of the company for a billion dollars then they are valued at 800b even if they only have a billion dollars. It’s advantageous for investors to both buy in as cheaply as possible but also have future investors to buy in as expensive as possible to prop up a, perhaps inaccurate, valuation.

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nl 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a valuation, not the amount they raised.

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0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's raised in the sense that some people made a pinky promise to give them cash. But those people also don't have the money and have to raise it from other places. It's largely SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia, all of whom don't have big piggybanks full of hundreds of billions. They ask for loans based on the promise of making cash to pay for it, and that cash is based on people wanting to use OpenAI. So it's kind of a big financial circle jerk. (Debt, SPVs, loans from Nvidia (at high interest rates), etc)

	▲	nl 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This isn't right > It's largely SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia, all of whom don't have big piggybanks full of hundreds of billions. Actually SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia literally have free cash sitting there. NVIDIA for example had over $60B in audited, reported free cash flow in 2025[1] > loans from Nvidia (at high interest rates), Is this just something you are making up? "NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed. The first phase is targeted to come online in the second half of 2026 using the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform."[2] The closes there is to waht you are saying is reporting that NVIDIA has discussed guaranteeing some of the loans OpenAI is taking to build data centers: "Nvidia is discussing guaranteeing some of the loans that OpenAI is planning to take out in order to build its own data centers, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter."[3] This of course is the opposite of NVIDIA loaning OpenAI money - if they did this they would be liable for OpenAI's debts. [1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia... [2] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/openai-and-nvidia-announc... [3] https://archive.is/Gpvq2#selection-1299.0-1301.181

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nothinkjustai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Vibe coding requires the sota models to work at all, but someone who knows what they are doing and uses the AI more responsibly can absolutely use the cheaper Chinese models for coding, and they’re often faster too. If I was one of the big players my entire focus would be on lobbying for regulation and outright banning of local models.

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storus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, Qwen3 coder for Claude Code and 3.5 for OpenClaw replaced my full-stack use of Opus 4.6 already; it's fine for basic web apps, k8s/docker infra setup, optimizing AI models etc. with only slightly higher error rate than Opus. Upcoming 3.6 together with Gemma4 might make it even better (still to test). OpenAI's memory spot market play might have been directed at local inference as well.

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nothinkjustai 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Look for Deepseek 4 when it drops, I’m curious how good it will be.

The thing is, if you’re using AI responsibly today you’re already breaking down tasks to such a granular level that you don’t need the power of Opus. You can save that for deeper research tasks.

	▲	storus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Based on the current DeepSeek website I suspect it's not going to be great as their current model (V3.4? V4-mini?) often forgets or changes facts explicitly mentioned in the conversation which R1 never did. It's better than R1 at math or coding, but nearly unusable for deep conversation. I suspect they pushed MLA or linear attention too much, or quantize a lot more than before.

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canpan 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am playing around with this at home right now. I think a lot of the latest improvements came with the harness, instead of AI.

The part I am working on is to have better tools and data to search over. Curated for my needs. Similar to the Karpathy post yesterday about his wiki. I am trying something similar and even qwen 3.5 is totally fine for most of what I do.

Disclaimer: I bought memory before the crisis started. Not sure if I would build my PC as is now..