Sam conceded he had no business plan in 2022 after releasing chatgpt. He even said he doesn't intend to come up with a business model, he would rather wait for the model to reach AGI then ask it to come up with a model.

No he wasn't wearing a red ball on his nose. He didn't even smile saying this. Dead serious.

> If OpenAI had a sound business plan and was on strong financial footing, they'd have IPO'd.

OTOH, if a company has a sound business plan and strong financial footing it may not need to IPO -- unless the founders or VCers want out ASAP.

> 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.

If a startup is riding a hype cycle and is one of two leaders in the global industry with unreal growth numbers, they can IPO whenever they want. The incentives lean toward doing an IPO before the hype runs out, not delaying it.

If they were worried about running out of VC money, going to the public (the P in IPO) would be the move.

Companies don't actually have to go public quickly or even at all, even though that's been drilled into us as the only goal of every investor-backed startup.

> 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.

What about Stripe?

The same is true for Anthropic, by the way.

“The plan is to invent AGI and then task it with working out how to make money”