Maybe this is a dumb take but I don't think they'll ever go public. Their company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that I don't think it makes sense to go public at all.

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blitzar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Their company is so volatile and unsustainable in the long-term that it makes sense to go public (for the current owners)

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grebc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, Sam definitely doesn’t want to be holding this bag.

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fidotron 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yes he does - it makes him one of the most powerful people on earth.

	▲	majormajor 24 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In the "volatile and unstable" scenario that you're replying to, the $BILLIONS from cashing out while it's a hot market is a more sure way to have long-term influence on things.
	▲	bamboozled 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"the power"

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delfinom 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only if they can find a way to dress up their financials for the IPO filing. They don't want to get WeWorked.

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nrmitchi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It really doesn't matter. They're doing secondary offerings for employees and individual holders, and they'll have no issue allowing private transactions for larger holders.

The general wealth distribution has shifted to the point that they do not need access to public funds, and frankly, if they can't find private funds for their needs, it is a huge red flag that they would just be dumping on the public.

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deepwoods an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The problem with secondary offerings is that it means that someone in the private markets winds up holding the bag. It is in the best interests of insiders to have the public holding the bag if and when things go south. Even if you don't believe it will ever go south, the profits OAI would need to generate to justify the investment the private markets have flooded into OAI are absolutely gargantuan, and they are generally not built to sit around for multiple years collecting distributions. They need to return money to their LPs, and soon.

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nrmitchi an hour ago | parent [-]

The "private market" at this point is so huge though that you'll have an "insiders" private market, and an "outsiders" public market to dump the bag on that the insiders don't care about.

	▲	deepwoods 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's fair, but there is clearly agitation from some corners to IPO at some point.

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dgellow an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> it is a huge red flag that they would just be dumping on the public

unless the public is clueless

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

In its current state the economics of the company make little sense to me. The astronomical costs to execute a prompt versus the relatively tiny price tag to the customer smells like an Enron scandal to me except everyone knows it and we’ve accepted it. Wall street is less forgiving.

Isn’t one of the reasons to go public to raise capital? They seemed to be doing that just fine without the weight of the open market with extremely profitable companies like Nvidia funneling billions of dollars in.

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arjie an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How much does it cost to execute a prompt in your estimation vs. the cost to the customer? Even being a DeepSeek provider is profitable so long as you have utilization and the AI provides mostly have high utilization.

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rileymat2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have not gotten good numbers on the real inference costs, its kind of annoying. Most comparisons are with the API costs, where we have no idea how profitable it is.

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csto12 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Wall street is less forgiving.

Have you heard of $TSLA before?

	▲	boredatoms 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tesla generally makes enough money to cover their costs though

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mrbungie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Wall street is less forgiving.

We've seen multiple times how "Wall street" is an exit for insiders, with retail investors left holding the bag.

	▲	4lx87 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't get it. Isn't every IPO a potential exit for investors?

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bitwize 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was just thinking of this today. AI is pretty much precisely a Theranos style grift, but unlike Theranos, who were shooting for something outright impossible, Dario and Sam may be running the biggest "fake it till you make it" success story of all time. Because like Professor Harold Hill they came through in the clutch at the last possible moment, and produced a band that could kinda play music, enough to win enough faith and goodwill to fund the next round. That kind of good fortune is going to be worth untold billions if not trillions, and it's gonna make a lot of programmers butthurt because their hopes of getting in on the ground floor and being a "founding engineer" in the next Silicon Valley unicorn are dashed forever, because the Valley doesn't need them anymore. Just a business bro and enough compute to generate the operations for the business.

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willsmith72 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the only way they never go public is if they die quickly

edit: which I doubt btw. investors are going to want to dump the bags very soon

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VCFundedGenYer an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They are constantly out of money, going public would be the dumbest move imaginable. They are unstable, not only financially, but in leadership.

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fidotron an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, this seems fairly clear.

Either OpenAI fails, and goes nowhere.

Or it succeeds, in which case IPOing will be a quaint aspect of history.

People really aren't following through on what it means for any of these companies to succeed.

	▲	hdgvhicv an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Or the ipo happens before hand and pension funds and passive trackers transfer to the insiders.