> zero information on how it’s doing

I think the fact that we have so little information is the most important information we have. If OpenAI had a sound business plan and was on strong financial footing, they'd have IPO'd.

All of this continued stalling and obfuscation can only mean one thing, IMO: OpenAI has no long-term viability and they're desperately hoping for some new breakthrough to reinvent their business model before the VC money faucets turn off for good.

What regulation makes it so that a large private company would have to go public? You have it backwards. Increased regulations make it more burdensome for a company to go public, driving companies like OpenAI to remain private. If you made it less expensive and burdensome to IPO (decreased regulation), you would see companies go IPO earlier.

This also coincides with a growing market for private credit and VC which certainly helps companies stay private for longer.

Nobody is quiet about doing well. And the frenetic release schedule of kinda half baked products tells a story (not a good one)

it really is a privatize the gains socialize the losses situation, isn't it? due to the new rules (or lack thereof), public investors didn't have access to all that growth.

no way it ever gives you a return like, say, the amazon IPO could've.

They would go public if they were doing well.

> This is an interesting shift compared to the past where OpenAI would’ve been public a long time ago (due to various regulations) so we would have much more direct insight.

There's a good recent YouTube video about the shift in regulations that switched IPOs from being a way to raise money for growth to being a way to dump on retail investors after all the significant growth has been funded by private investors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roe3SgezmmU

How much money do they have left? It is hard for me to see how OpenAI doesn't fail at this point. There is no business, no moat. Honestly, the best outcome seems like failing up into a Microsoft acquisition at this point.

>The pair calculate the figure in different ways, with Anthropic including the revenue from sales via cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.

gift link didn't work for me, and is this poorly phrased? because it seems implausible that OpenAI doesn't typically include revenue from their models being used on AWS. Perhaps the "gross up" is referring to how the number is included? like Anthropic was using the value pre-removal of revenue sharing and putting the revenue share subtraction as a separate expense?

[not a finance guy so someone tell me I'm wrong if that's not a plausible reading]

> Apparently they overstated revenue in an attempt to try to provide a direct comparison with Anthropic's reported metrics.

Just to clarify from my understanding of the quote, "they" here is openai investors, not openai.

Obviously not the same thing as lying, but Anthropic had also been juicing the revenues with making smart models incredibly verbose. In August my org 3x more in API credits vs July. In September the spend returned to July levels partially because they made models less verbose, but mostly because we've changed how we are using them.

> Apparently they overstated revenue in an attempt to try to provide a direct comparison with Anthropic's reported metrics.

I'm confident both companies are lying about their revenues.

The link doesn't work.

All that tells you is that they haven't at all abandoned the disinformation: Now they are blaming Anthropic for it and trying to shift attention to them.

You can still learn something from it: Look at what they do, not what they say - look at how sophisticated their public communication is. They deliver that information in the perfect manner - not only the redirection and striking a blow against their rival, but they use an anonymous "person with knowledge of the matter": A named source at OpenAI might betray the self-interest in the statement, but some anonymous third party is just reporting what they know.

These guys are very good at it, though that shouldn't surprise you. Look at their product, in one sense a highly effective disinformation machine.

Exactly.

  > far short of the $70bn reported by the FT and other media outlets late last month based on information that was provided to investors.

Still, seems it is still true that their number is not directly comparable to Anthropic's because they calculate it differently, I think that part still stands and is pretty relevant here.

No. You should read the article

> based on information that was provided to investors.

It was OpenAI spreading their bullshit annualized revenue.

OpenAI and Anthropic always play this silly game to pretend they are in anyway viable. It is always ARR, "adjusted" revenue, etc. "We are profitable when we pretend we don't have expenses".

Zitron complained about a lot of things, one some he was wrong (eg. llm are not useful), on others(eg. "magic accounting" or datacenters ) he has very good points ... but we will see.

It is rarely a challenge to turn $100 into $50.

Nvidia’s revenue is more than that per quarter, the demand for AI workloads is through the roof.

When the dust settles, I reckon OAI will make FTX's losses look like chump change

Not a good day for the entire Nasdaq thanks to Scam A and his magic numbers.