That's only half the problem. OpenAI is contractually obligated, if you will, to believe that models will continue improving at an impressive rate for the foreseeable future (otherwise their valuation makes no sense).

If you believe that, then you should expect to get Sol-level performance out of a Luna-cost model within six months or a year. If you have a system with the weights baked in, that means you're going to end up serving that Sol-class model several times more expensively than it will take someone who comes along a few months later. (such as what recently happened with DeepSeek's update.)

And under that assumption of continuing advancement, baking things in doesn't make sense in general - it's a play you'd make if you think things are slowing down a lot. Which may be right but it's not OpenAI or anthropic's play.

Assume a $800 billion valuation. $100 billion ad network. $30 billion op income. 26x price to op income ratio. It's right there for them to grab, or someone else to grab.

Their valuation does make sense if you believe: 1) they can retain a massive user base and 2) a massive user base can be monetized. Future value is almost always pulled forward these days for high growth tech companies.

An LLM the size of Google search in users is even more valuable than Google search. The ad market for LLMs will be even larger than search was (no matter what HN prefers).

The monetization part is the easier part. Silicon Valley understands extraordinarily well how to build ad networks. If OpenAI maintain their gigantic user base, a $100 billion ad network is a given bolt-on. They'd have to screw that up in an epic way to not get there.

Facebook - Insta - WhatsApp is an absolute dogshit tandem with a gigantic user base. $228 billion in ad sales and still expanding 10% per year.

Google knows this is what's happening, that's why they don't care about chasing Anthropic very much. They're busy completely remaking how their core search business works.