Sign of What's To Come?
Yes, Softbank and OpenAI not being able to agree to deal terms is a negative for AI valuations.
Masa has been burned many times, most recently with WeWork. Perhaps he, like many of us, is asking: “Why was OpenAI worth $150 billion in Q4 2024 and $300 billion today? What has Sam Altman done to justify a doubling of an already rich valuation in 9 months? Where’s GPT 5? It’s almost a year late.”
Gen-AI end-user revenue is after all only $10-15 billion. How does that justify $4-5 Trillion in AI-related market cap gains over the past several years?
Gen AI is a massive short waiting to happen. That’s coming from me, someone who is a heavy user of Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT o3 and Claude 4 (I haven’t used Grok 4). Engineers are not going away tomorrow.