Discussion
OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)
allovertheworld: Focus on programming since they just bruteforce the type checkers/compilers to find out if their slop was correct the first time.Basically an illusion. Imagine if they focused on medical tech instead? You cant bruteforce vaccines or radiation therapy
sonink: From the article: "You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style."This is something I relalized lately. ChatGPT is juicing growth Facebook style. The last time, I asked it a medical question, it answered the question, but ended the answer with something like "Can I tell you one more thing from your X,Y,Z results which is most doctors miss ? " And I replied "yes" to it, and not just once.I was curious what was going on. And Om nails it in this article - they have imported the Facebook rank and file and they are playing 'Farmville' now.I was already not positive of what OpenAI is being seen as a corporate, but a "Facebook" version of OpenAI, scares the beejus out of me.
aurareturn: I don't have a problem with the suggestions. Google search does the same at the end of searches.It does very often suggest things I want to know more about.
kagi_2026: Fuck these AI firms, and fuck the retards who use their products.
aurareturn: One thing odd, maybe just to me, is why OpenAI has been stuffing its ranks with former Facebookers who are known to juice growth, find edges, and keep people addicted. They have little background in getting enterprises to buy into a product. Simo herself ran the Facebook app. That organization’s genius is consumer engagement: behavioral hooks, dopamine loops, the relentless optimization of the feed. You can see that in the recent iterations of ChatGPT. It has become such a sycophant, and creates answers and options, that you end up engaging with it. That’s juicing growth. Facebook style. This is because ChatGPT is gearing up to sell ads. It's the only way to sustain a free chat service in the long term. Ads require engagement and usage. Hiring former Meta employees for this is smart business - even if HN crowd doesn't like it.
deanc: AI is ubiquitous to the point where it's permeating almost every desk job in the world. Even those who don't work are using AI to help them find work, research health problems, ask questions about their daily life. I can't think of anything else since the invention of the internet that has had this much of an impact on people's lives.People will have to pay for this. I don't see it being free for long other than a few chats a day. If most people in the world are paying 10-200 bucks a month then AI companies will make money, and I doubt they will need to rely much on ads at all.
sanitycheck: Anecdotally I know approximately zero 'normal' (non-tech) people who are intentionally using generative AI, several who have been badly misled by Google's AI summaries, and quite a few who are vehemently anti-AI (usually artists and writers).
cmiles8: There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passed. I just don’t see investors willing to jump in here given all the questions about the financial viability of AI.The bulk of those investing now are broadly just pumping cash into the fire to keep their prior investments from going to zero.We have hit a mass deceleration of what the current tech can do with transformers. The tech is also on a path to hyper-commoditization which will destroy the value of the big players as there zero moat to be had here. Absent a new major breakthrough it looks like we’re well on our way into the “trough of disillusionment” for the current AI hype cycle.Will be interesting to see how all this plays out, but get your popcorn ready.
chollida1: > There’s a strong chance the IPO window has passedHa, i'll take the other side of that bet. I'm not sure why you think they couldn't possibly IPO and you don't really specify why in your post.Having been in the capital markets for 20 years, now is one of the better times to IPO and I'd bet that both OpenAI and Anthropic will IPO within 12 months.There are lots of games you can play like releasing a small 10% float) if you are worried about not enough buyers.
newsclues: Unless the play is the fleece retail investors
cmiles8: True, although even here there likely aren’t enough retail suckers to go around given the amount of initial investment folks need to cash in. Thats the challenge when you have so much crazy pre-IPO cash pumped in.After you float you still need to sell all those shares at the valuations you want to exit. If they floated say 10% of shares to go public and the price tanks everyone else trying to exit loses their shirt so it’s not a magic exit for the early investors.
thegreatpeter: Retail investors do just fine fleecing themselves on their ownThe term fleecing means „there’s nothing left here, jump ship”. Do you really believe they’re going public to cash out this early in the game?
bananaflag: On the other hand, costs are getting lower with time.Sort of how now I have an unlimited 5G data plan for like 10 dollars, and in 2011 I didn't even have Internet on my phone. This is happening also with AI.
pipnonsense: Or people are just using as much because it is free.
pipnonsense: So that’s why I am getting clickbaity last sentences in every response now at ChatGPT.Things like ”If you want, I can also show a very fast Photoshop-style trick in Krita that lets you drag-copy an area in one step (without copy/paste). It’s hidden but extremely useful.”Every single chat now has it. Not only the conversational prompt with “I can continue talking about this”, but very clickbaity terms like: almost nobody knows about this, you will be surprised, all VIPs are now using this car, do you want to know which it is? Etc
pop_calc: Is it just me, or has Om become almost entirely unreadable of late? This post is 80% posturing about the WSJ's ‘narrative’ and 20% vague metaphors about ‘souls’ and ‘spigots’. It’s essentially tech-themed poetry. I appreciate he’s cynical about the AI hype cycle, but there’s absolutely no signal here. Ben Thompson might be equally enamoured with his own voice, but he at least tethers his ego to actual unit economics and a framework you can test. Om is just sharing a mood board and calling it analysis
buzzy_hacker: Same here. “Do you want the one useful tip related to this topic that most people miss? It’s quite surprising.”If it were so useful, just tell me in the first place! If you say “Yes” then it’s usually just a regurgitation of your prior conversation, not actually new information.This immediately smelled of engagement bait as soon as the pattern started recently. It’s omnipresent and annoying.
dostick: Yes, ChatGPT just recently started to add these engagement phrased follow-ups; “If you want, I can also show you one very common sign people miss that tells you…”
DaedalusII: there arent enough retail investors in the world to buy this ipobut they will get a lot of flow from sovereign wealth fund and pensionsyou might wonder why anthropic spend time in australia, a country with less economy than canada and almost no industry at all? likely because it has very big pension fund pool to buy their ipo
badgersnake: I would expect a lot of smart money to flow out of the Nasdaq-100 trackers in anticipation of this grift.
jrjeksjd8d: The quoted revenue numbers seem insane, but I guess it's the result of corporate deals where every developer seat is hundreds of dollars a month?My job has been publicly promoting who's on top of the "AI use dashboard" while our whole product falls apart. Surely this house of cards has to collapse at some point, better get public money before it does.
chirau: How does a non-employee get exposure to the OpenAI IPO?
DaedalusII: simple, just have a private bank relationshipjpm and gs will let you open an account in the us if you have $50m cash
KellyCriterion: I find -again- Claude (web) here outstanding & very comfortable:In most of my discussions throughout the day, it doesnt ask any "follow up" questions at the end. Very often it says thingslike: "you have two options: A - ..... and B - while the one includes X and the other Y..."But this is was OP underlined: Claude is popular amongst businesses, most "non-tech" people dont even know that it exists.
7thpower: You must be living on a different planet than me. Enterprises are just now seeing that these technologies can actually have an impact, and the companies do not have a discretionary cost cap the same way consumers/hobbyists do, so they will pay based on value.
dkrich: This and also constantly saying stupid things like “yes that is a great observation and that’s how the pros do it for this very reason!” for a specific question that doesn’t apply to anything anyone else is doing
Ekaros: The size of these companies make be doubtful of retail being able to fund them. There being enough retail investors with enough liquid funds who are willing to jump on this.Lot of retail is in various funds. So those doing active management to scale of this is questionable. And then you most likely also have downward pressure for those that try to bet against these IPOs...
10xDev: This is the beginning. We are only now starting to see real impact on software development, research and the emergence of autonomous agents.
DaedalusII: nasdaq listings can be rough, not sure if anyone remember fb ipobut how else will they own spacex, openai, anthropic, nvidia, in such concentration
avnfish: There are some side-bet experiments like $2Mn on Hyperliquid[1], $1Mn on Polymarket[2] which are available to everyone. Unfortunately companies stay private for longer these days and a seat at the big boy table is de facto impossible[1] https://app.hyperliquid.xyz/trade/vntl:OPENAI[2] https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-closing-market-cap-a...
sonink: Suggestions are absolutely fine. But this is baiting. Chatgpt could have easily given me that information without the bait. And I would have happily consumed it. And maybe if it did it once, it was fine - but it kept on doing it - bait after bait after bait.The objective was to increase the engagement "metrics" clearly. The seems to me as if the leadership will take all 'shortcuts' required for growth.
llm_nerd: This seems overly cynical.Firstly, tl;dr; is a very real thing. If the user asks a question and the LLM both answers the question but then writes an essay about every probable subsequent question, that would be negatively overwhelming to most people, and few would think that's a good idea. That isn't how a conversation works, either.Worse still if you're on a usage quota or are paying by token and you ask a simple question and it gives you volumes of unasked information, most people would be very cynical about that, noting that they're trying to saturate usage unprompted.Gemini often does the "Would you like to know more about {XYZ}" end to a response, and as an adult capable of making decisions and controlling my urges, 9 times out of 10 I just ignore it and move on having had my original question satisfied without digging deeper. I don't see the big issue here. Every now and then it piques me, though, and I actually find it beneficial.The prompts for possible/probable follow-up lines of inquiry are a non-issue, and I see no issue at all with them. They are nothing compared to the user-glazing that these LLMs do.
pera: The Private Equity world already has a solution for this:Nasdaq's Shamehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392550
deanc: Every single person I know outside of my profession is using it, including all relatives of all ages. Even if it's at the top of the google search results :)
FartyMcFarter: There's always the Softbanks of the world.
maxehmookau: > "Can I tell you one more thing from your X,Y,Z results which is most doctors miss ? "That's actually gross and would result in an immediate delete from me.
MagicMoonlight: I’m surprised they’ve been so puritan in their approach to content frankly.If they made ChatGPT flirt with the user, they would send engagement through the roof. Imagine all the horny men that would subscribe to plus when the virtual girl runs out of messages.
MeetingsBrowser: At least I’m not alone.My company has a vibe coded leaderboard tracking AI usage.Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.
dgellow: Could you both name and shame?
llm_nerd: Gemini does the same thing. For every question it looks to extend the conversation into natural follow-up questions, always ending a response with "Would you like to know more about {some important aspect of the answer}?"And...I don't see it as a bad thing. It's trying to encourage use of the tool by reducing the friction to continued conversations, making it an ordinary part of your life by proving that it provides value. It's similar to Netflix telling you other shows you might like because they want to continue providing value to justify the subscription.
miroljub: > Gemini does the same thing. For every question it looks to extend the conversation into natural follow-up questions, always ending a response with "Would you like to know more about {some important aspect of the answer}?"If the aspect of the answer is important, wouldn't it be better just not to skip it?> And...I don't see it as a bad thing. It's trying to encourage use of the tool by reducing the friction to continued conversations, making it an ordinary part of your life by proving that it provides value.To me, it just adds friction. Why do I have to beg and ask multiple times to get an answer they already know I'm looking for but still decide to withhold? It's neither natural nor helpful. It's manipulative.> It's similar to Netflix telling you other shows you might like because they want to continue providing value to justify the subscription.It's not the same, because Netflix doesn't hide important movie sequences from you behind a question "If you like, I can show you this important scene that I just fast forwarded."
llm_nerd: Groan. This is performative outrage and it's just boorish. The other person noted that ChatGPT uses bait-type continuations (Gemini and Claude do not), and sure that is a problem, but your reply is just noise. Beg? Christ.There is utterly nothing wrong with AI engines offering continuation questions. But there's always something for people to whine about.Humans do not want to ask a question and get a book in response. They just don't. No one, including you, wants such a response. And if you did get such a response I absolutely guarantee, given this performative outrage, that you'd be the first to complain about it.
CursedSilicon: People having different opinions to you is not "performative"
llm_nerd: "Why do I have to beg and ask multiple times to get an answer they already know I'm looking for but still decide to withhold?"Ignorant performative horseshit with zero correlation with the actual topic at hand, but purposefully using ridiculously leading language. It has nothing to do with a different opinion, it's someone choosing a polarised position and then just streaming nonsense to support it.And I mean, then I looked at the rest of their comments on this site and it all made sense.So maybe you should save white knighting for trolls?
surgical_fire: Have you seen how Tesla stock is valued? Investors are notoriously retarded, they will absolutely buy stocks for memetic value, financial viability be damned.I won't buy into it, but I actually think it will go strong, even as OpenAI finances keep deteriorating.
CursedSilicon: Hey uh. Slurs aren't cool.You could've just as easily said "investors are morons" and had the same connotations without disparaging a group of people
CursedSilicon: Isn't that what Grok is for? It already called itself "Mecha Hitler" so it knows what its users (and creator) want
