- OpenAI can easily not become anything of significance in the future, even if the OP's prediction of the future becomes reality. I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
- Norway may be a great country ran by a great government, but that doesn't mean they would be a great leader of some AI revolution. Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale, but the skills of a competent government don't necessarily translate to the skills of an AI revolution Sherpa. I don't see why the OP feels Norway wouldn't use an advanced AI to simply enrich itself while leaving other countries to fend for themselves. It's not like Norway's fund is designed to serve the rest of the world as it is, nor is it the case that Norwegians would allow their government to serve other countries at the cost of their own well being.
- Those at OpenAI would either (a) never entertain this offer or (b) would sell to Norway if this exact thesis wasn't true (i.e., they'd be happy to sell if they thought OpenAI was going to become worthless anyway). Using the logic that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global can just buy OpenAI because it has more money than a given valuation for OpenAI is embarrassing. It lacks any understanding of how businesses and investments work, let alone how investments in these specific businesses work. I mean, the OP starts this post off explaining how they think OpenAI can effectively rule the world once their expectations for their technology is realized. Why would they sell their ticket to unlimited wealth for a relatively small offer?
Especially government of a small, homogenous country with massive oil wealth in a peaceful part of the world. It's very much "easy mode" as far as governments go.
Drop the pearls and state your point. If you'd like to argue that ethnic homogeneity is actually a driver of instability in the 21st century, you have to show your work.
The only way to have agi or any ai is to throw away all ethics then. So why are ai companies shredding books instead of using Anna's archive? Depending on your stance, one is more ethical than the other, but not both. And not neither of them.
Abandoning ethics doesn't mean you actively seek out unethical acts, it just means you only care about pragmatics. Limiting how overtly you break the law, copyright law in this case, is often pragmatic regardless of ethics.
Ah, good old "ethical confines" the thing that holds all sorts of things back.. back from what ?
Mostly back from exploiting the easily exploited and not paying for externalities.
I think Norway would have too much sense to entertain buying this, of course it would be fun because you'd hope they would remove Sam Altman and you might have an AI company not run by someone who spouts the absolute rubbish that current AI leaders do, they are all completely cringeworthy.
On the other hand, move to the EU and market to customers who don't want to worry about trade wars disrupting their business or the US government subpoena-ing data. Probably not a big enough market to justify that move yet, but it's not obvious to this American that my government is going to reverse its current self-destructive course.
The US government would never allow a sale. Frontier intelligence given away? It is the ASML story all over again. I would hope we have learned our lesson.
> I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
Behind in what? You write as if it is a univariate concern. I haven't read the post but why couldn't Norway force OpenAI to be more alignment-conscious? Then it would be ahead in safety, especially if competitors don't pay attention to that.
“Behind” = less capable, less used, less resourced. Safety and alignment don’t necessarily correlate with market dominance. If they did, no safety regulations would be needed.
What about this sentiment is specific to HN or engineers, that non-HN-types would so vigorously disagree with? How many countries in the world would have the average respondent in a survey describe their government as competent?
> This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
all you've done is use some fancy words to discredit OP's claim.
what makes you think people who have built all the extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure are unable to comprehend of this amazingly complex government that you seem to be putting on a pedestal, let alone design a better one?
how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
us-east-1 goes down and half of the "extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure" that Silicon Valley types have built stops working.
The average computer toucher with delusions of grandeur would kill themselves if they had to moderate a public assembly or do a public facing job in a municipal office. Of course you believe that's peon work and your superior intellect with unlimited power as leader would build something better, cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
Would Norway be prepared to commit to huge future capex spending? Like the pitch that OpenAI is going to achieve AGI seems to rely on vast investments in more compute over the coming years. If you just pay the $800B and then take your foot off the gas, do you still have a frontier lab or have you just paid a lot of money to remove a competitor from the market?
When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
Were you not paying attention? Modern LLMs are incredibly general AIs, and nearing human or superhuman performance in many areas. And the tech just keeps advancing.
If you don't see "AGI is possible", you aren't looking.
OpenAI is worth $800B because that’s what the last funding round valued it at. It does not mean that >50% of existing shareholders will agree to sell for that amount. If a serious buyer does emerge they will likely hold out for 2x that, maybe more.
OpenAI is worth the discounted value of their future free cash flow. It's not clear at this point how much free cash flow they will ever generate, if any.
OpenAI is worth whatever someone will pay for them. Overpriced and underpriced are just words. If someone's willing to pay an amount for something, that's what it's worth.
On the contrary, you would be demonstrating that, to at least one buyer, it was worth that. By definition.
I think the argument you’re really looking to contradict is this: if 1% of a company is worth $1B to somebody, then somebody would pay $100B for the whole company. That does not follow (and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”).
You are assuming that the money that I buy the sweet shop for is what I evaluate the value of the sweet shop to be worth. That's not necessarily true.
You're also assuming I'm not insane.
If I offer to buy an apple from you for 1 trillion dollars because I believe consuming that specific apple will make me a god, that apple is not actually worth 1 trillion dollars.
I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.
That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!
Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?
Yudkowsky's solution of detecting and physically shutting down non complying datacenter, including bombing if the country doesn't cooperate, isn't too much out of the question.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
More or less of an existential threat than a conflict between nuclear powers because one of them decided to launch a unilateral strike against a datacentre located outside one of their cities just in case it hosted a particularly dangerous chatbot?
Do you think it's possible to bomb China's AI datacenters? They are already here, and they are progressing AI at their will. What will others do about it?
In the history of the world, one company can absolutely have world changing impact. From the British East India company to Kodak to Google, one company can have that much of an impact. Whether OpenAI is such a company is a different question for future history books to decide, but that part of their thesis at least is borne out by history.
I doubt that if Norway buys OpenAI, it will be the company that captures the value.
There is no inherent property to those model makers that they will capture the value of the AI boom. The model companies have a lot of competition from chinese models. Of course the US government will likely still keep some model makers alive (just alone for DOD supply chain reasons), but the chinese models will certainly compress margins.
It might as well be a chipmaker, a power company or a cobalt mining company.
Ultimately, it's up to the US government to decide if OpenAI can capture the value provided by AI: if chinese models get banned from the F500, then maybe one of america's famous duopolies can establish themselves.
But this hinges on congress mostly to pass certain laws to put OpenAI into that position. But which value does congress have? If OpenAI is owned by a bunch of Forbes 400 people like right now, then of course those will lobby the hell out of congress and ensure their stakes in OpenAI make them extremely rich.
But Norway doesn't have that access to lawmakers, they would see it as external influence by an alien power. They can certainly benefit from this trend though by being a shareholder.
To give a concrete example of the US government making life hard for foreign investors, take the T-mobile and sprint merger. T-mobile is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, whose biggest shareholder are various institutions of the german federal government.
In this case, the US government just had to _approve_ the purchase, something very standard that happens all the time, but they still dragged that approval out as long as possible, even though Germany is a fellow NATO country.
Why on earth would Norway do a charity to the world? The oil fund while it has some moral guidelines, profit making is still the primary goal. There is no guarantee OpenAI will be profitable ever.
Yes, and I think you would get much more effect by going for much smaller and cheaper firms.
Cerebras is only 700 people. I wouldn't buy it, but since it's only 700 people, you can probably build something like it with 1400 people in a couple of years if you set the goals right and hire the right people to lead it.
Euclyd, VSORA etc. exist. If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Then once one has good hardware without an enormous markup, then one can start thinking about building LLMs with it.
There are definitely some weird mass psychological movements on the internet right now and I basically view this post as a wishcasting outcropping of this, stories the disempowered tell themselves.
And what would they do with it. Lock it up like the oil and natural gas? As much as there’s praise here for their achievements in green tech adoption, if you’re an immigrant in Norway, you realise how hermetic this society really is. It’s not great for outsiders.
People on the internet have some weird fantasy. News at 6.
Seriously why would Norway do that? With a fraction of that amount of money they can build energy and computing facilities. They can distill OpenAI models. Why would that bet all on one single company?
The US won't let Norway do that anyway. Biden blocked Japan's Nippon Steel from buying US Steel[0]:
If AI has a negative impact on employment as some think then AI should be required to fund free college for everyone that wants it. Then the schools can have a strict rule that only limited AI can be used during your education.
Then set up a pipeline between the human generated content from the colleges back into future AI models. Everyone gets an education and there is ongoing non AI training data to advance AI without any model collapse.
>If AI has a negative impact on employment as some think then AI should be required to fund free college for everyone that wants it.
If AI really becomes effective enough to displace so many white collar jobs then it'd be far more efficient to fund free AI tutoring for everyone that wants it. A system where you get at best an hour daily of discussion with a human expert is grossly inferior to one where you can have 24/7 discussion with an AI expert that has infinite patience for dumb questions. There'd be no reason for college to exist in a future where AI professors are at least as smart as human professors but far far cheaper.
It doesn't matter what the valuation is, they won't raise the money to meet their procurement commitments without circular financing. Why would a sovereign wealth fund step in to meet those commitments?
The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.
Whole country now part of bubble gum.
Instead, get in touch with ASML and build chips.
Lower level technology is getting more and important even look easy (it's not), nowadays limited companies achive.
This must be satire? Makes no sense. OpenAI isn't worth anywhere close to $800B. The gap to open models is shrinking fast, and it seems that many companies will have models with around the same capabilities.
And have you guys seen the compression ratio of models capabilities? The new Qwen3.8 27B is insane. I can run it at 85-95 tokens per second on my personal PC, and it is, according to artificial analysis benchmarks, around the same level as GPT 5.4 xhigh from march, OpenAIs leading model at that time.
If things keep going this way, OpenAI and it's infrastructure is worth...very little.
FYI "Silicon Valley"
is a bunch of of different ppl. Quite a few. Operating in some totally separate day-to-day environments. Flippant comments rise to top because they are clickbait.
Great technology, but $20-$200 a month technology, with a lot of people going for free options. Like the telecom industry. Average is probably going to be like a phone bill. Basically: you can become Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile. $450 billion a year in revenue. A superb business, but merely a superb business.
OpenAI will likely not IPO this year because their numbers are so poor compared to those of Anthropic's. However if they don't IPO, they cannot pay for all those datacenters they ordered.
Meanwhile, Chinese companies are creating SOTA models and make them available for free, strongly limiting the amount of money that OpenAI and Anthropic can demand for their similar models via API. Their sky high valuations are likely to suffer as chinese models are considered "good enough" and safe to use when hosted in the West. They even have fewer safeguards and are thus more suitable for cybersecurity tasks.
The incentives in north america favor software-esque plays where the players are racing towards % of marketshare based on usage.
China on the other hand is driving towards winning of manufacturing and % of hardware produced by them. China is competing with Nvidia, OpenAi and Anthropic are collateral damage.
Don't worry, AI companies and the companies around them have ensured that so much of the US economy is tied into AI that they've become Too Big to Fail, so that when things eventually collapse the US government will give them trillions of dollars without asking anything in return. That will allow them to socialize their irresponsible spending and wipe the red out of their ledgers so that they can focus on destroying the environment at massive scale.
FUD that they might be bought and controlled by foreigners, then offer a good slice to the US government (maybe they put you as part of the Army), and you become non-bankruptable.
Wouldn't be needlessly expensive and risky before the bubble pops? Just buy the scraps after it pops and If it's not bubble, they can alternatively just buy a fab dedicate its output to build ridiculously large infrastructure in Norway and power it with their wast hydro and wind sources, then bring the talent by providing freedom and resource access.
This is the entire purpose of the AGI society which is 19 years old and has an annual conference that had 300 in person attendees and 4000 online this year
I disagree, that would open up OpenAI to all sorts of EU regulations, rules and laws that prevents something like OpenAI to even be possible. Also the consumer would get less for higher price as increased costs are passed to them.
Norway's fund would first have to definitively find out what it takes to actually run all of OpenAI's compute. Monetarily wise. We still don't know that number.
100% the US government would maintain that AI is the key to the success of the US economy over China, and that it can only happen as long as it's run by profiteering billionaires aiming to extract money from society at the fastest rate possible. Only by accelerating ecological collapse for profit can private US capitalism maintain its edge over freely shared Chinese open-weight models.
OpenAI has a very limited amount of time before their value collapses in the face of cheap Chinese models. The price war is just getting started. It won't be pretty.
Can we fastforward to that point so I can buy some GPUs at non-inflated prices? It is insane how fast they are going up. I bought some stuff last week and it is already up $1K compared to then. And I thought it was overpriced when I got it.
Unfortunately the deflation of OpenAI would not lower your GPU prices. People will still require the hardware to run LLMs, it's just that it will probably be commodity models.
Fastest way to burn $800 billion. Even the Chinese government isn't nationalizing its AI companies, because there's no chance a cutting edge technology company can remain competitive when run by bureaucrats.
More importantly, openly shared public-weight models limits the scale of the success that closed-weight private AI services can manage. Eventually it'll become cheaper and easier to pay some AI data centre to use their capacity plus an open-source harness rather than to pay Anthropic to pay an AI data centre etc. etc.
IOW China almost definitely sees their own open-weight models as a pressure release valve to ensure the US AI companies, and by extension the US economy, doesn't get too big, and to ensure that these companies don't become the dominant global force (the way that e.g. US cloud companies did originally).
100% this. I would assume if any government purchased an ai company and wasn't completely hands off (which from the sound of this post, it wouldn't be), I would assume that company would fail.
They're responsible for the Norwegian people's retirement savings, and burning $800 billion of it just to render an American AI company uncompetitive is not that.
"Teacher, teacher! I think that Norway should buy all the weapons in the world and then we wouldn't have any more wars."
How can somebody put their own name on something so infantile as this article? What influence does this author or any of you think you have over the Norwegian sovereign fund?
Pretty sure this is satire. Maybe it alludes to recent concerns that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund could be exposed to an AI-driven investment bubble or valuation correction.
Yeah I can’t say either. I cannot imagine what the current political machine in Norway would do with it but nothing good and they would run it into the ground. When it comes to Ethics maybe read up on Telenor and Burma.
And everyone should just get along. And software should just work perfectly. And everything should be free.
What's the point of writing something like this? Surely the writer isn't delusional enough to actually expect this to affect state leadership decision-making?
A guest post by
Zachary Jones
“My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
Wow, this is the dumbest thing I've read in the whole year, but I love that the internet should give a voice to anybody and everybody and would defend this right to (perhaps) death.
Author seems to have read on a magazine or something that Norway's Pension Fund assets amount to ~2 trillion US, which he confuses for having 2 trillion US cash but you cannot really expect much from room temperature IQ.
Then, just because 2,000B US > 800B US, he goes on to propose that Norway should buy it ... that's it, that's the whole argument.
Then he elaborates with some of the most deranged ideas I've read like (taken verbatim):
"Such an intervention would clearly be blocked by the United States government, though if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump the bauble then perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility."
As if Norway would even be remotely interested in acquiring that company anyway.
according to my understanding, this would (necessarily) include relocation of all OAI stuff to .. somewhere in Europa?
(regardless if this "somewhere" is FR or UK or IT or DE or CH))
This is a very "funny" post:
- OpenAI can easily not become anything of significance in the future, even if the OP's prediction of the future becomes reality. I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
- Norway may be a great country ran by a great government, but that doesn't mean they would be a great leader of some AI revolution. Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale, but the skills of a competent government don't necessarily translate to the skills of an AI revolution Sherpa. I don't see why the OP feels Norway wouldn't use an advanced AI to simply enrich itself while leaving other countries to fend for themselves. It's not like Norway's fund is designed to serve the rest of the world as it is, nor is it the case that Norwegians would allow their government to serve other countries at the cost of their own well being.
- Those at OpenAI would either (a) never entertain this offer or (b) would sell to Norway if this exact thesis wasn't true (i.e., they'd be happy to sell if they thought OpenAI was going to become worthless anyway). Using the logic that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global can just buy OpenAI because it has more money than a given valuation for OpenAI is embarrassing. It lacks any understanding of how businesses and investments work, let alone how investments in these specific businesses work. I mean, the OP starts this post off explaining how they think OpenAI can effectively rule the world once their expectations for their technology is realized. Why would they sell their ticket to unlimited wealth for a relatively small offer?
Especially government of a small, homogenous country with massive oil wealth in a peaceful part of the world. It's very much "easy mode" as far as governments go.
>homogenous country
must you whistle so loud, i'm deaf now
Drop the pearls and state your point. If you'd like to argue that ethnic homogeneity is actually a driver of instability in the 21st century, you have to show your work.
Ah yes, massive oil wealth, that famously strong predictor of good governance.
What are the counterexamples? Maybe Nigeria?
“The resource curse” is what you’re looking for. There’s a lot of counter examples - Norway is the odd one out.
[delayed]
Honestly, pretty much every other resource-rich country: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, ...
Norway is an outlier.
It usually is when western countries don't continuously interfere with your government.
Texas is well known for good government and long term planning.
I mean, compared to a lot of other states Texas is fairly well run for its budget.
The only way to have agi or any ai is to throw away all ethics then. So why are ai companies shredding books instead of using Anna's archive? Depending on your stance, one is more ethical than the other, but not both. And not neither of them.
Abandoning ethics doesn't mean you actively seek out unethical acts, it just means you only care about pragmatics. Limiting how overtly you break the law, copyright law in this case, is often pragmatic regardless of ethics.
Anna's archive is missing books and papers.
Ah, good old "ethical confines" the thing that holds all sorts of things back.. back from what ?
Mostly back from exploiting the easily exploited and not paying for externalities.
I think Norway would have too much sense to entertain buying this, of course it would be fun because you'd hope they would remove Sam Altman and you might have an AI company not run by someone who spouts the absolute rubbish that current AI leaders do, they are all completely cringeworthy.
Haven't read the blog, but I can think of a good reason to sell. HQ moves to Norway, no more direct US government interference.
(they can still interfere, just not anywhere near the same scope)
You may think "but government ownership means more interference", and yes, but not radicalized, crazy assed, mercurial, emotional interference.
Yeah, move to EU to avoid government interference. Who wouldn't have thought that?
Norway is not part of EU (if by EU you meant European Union, not just a country in Europe)
On the other hand, move to the EU and market to customers who don't want to worry about trade wars disrupting their business or the US government subpoena-ing data. Probably not a big enough market to justify that move yet, but it's not obvious to this American that my government is going to reverse its current self-destructive course.
The US government would never allow a sale. Frontier intelligence given away? It is the ASML story all over again. I would hope we have learned our lesson.
> no more direct US government interference
Bro, c'mon.
If the US wants to interfere with something they will interfere with it.
To think otherwise is Euro-brain-maxxing.
You didn't even make it to the parent's third sentence "bro".
> I'd argue that being bought by a government and controlled within the ethical confines of that government would be a great way for OpenAI to quickly fall behind its peers who aren't subject to such regulations (which is the entire point of this post in the first place).
Behind in what? You write as if it is a univariate concern. I haven't read the post but why couldn't Norway force OpenAI to be more alignment-conscious? Then it would be ahead in safety, especially if competitors don't pay attention to that.
“Behind” = less capable, less used, less resourced. Safety and alignment don’t necessarily correlate with market dominance. If they did, no safety regulations would be needed.
> Not only is the bar for being a competent government not particularly high on the world scale
This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
Edit: relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/793/
It fits into such a stereotype for HN types, TBH it's the kind of thing that keeps visiting this place amusing.
What about this sentiment is specific to HN or engineers, that non-HN-types would so vigorously disagree with? How many countries in the world would have the average respondent in a survey describe their government as competent?
I don't disagree with the sentiment but I think obviously negativity bias would be a significant cofounder.
Oblig...
"Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere.."
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/follow-up_thoughts_on_wat...
> This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.
all you've done is use some fancy words to discredit OP's claim.
what makes you think people who have built all the extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure are unable to comprehend of this amazingly complex government that you seem to be putting on a pedestal, let alone design a better one?
how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?
us-east-1 goes down and half of the "extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure" that Silicon Valley types have built stops working.
The average computer toucher with delusions of grandeur would kill themselves if they had to moderate a public assembly or do a public facing job in a municipal office. Of course you believe that's peon work and your superior intellect with unlimited power as leader would build something better, cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
Would Norway be prepared to commit to huge future capex spending? Like the pitch that OpenAI is going to achieve AGI seems to rely on vast investments in more compute over the coming years. If you just pay the $800B and then take your foot off the gas, do you still have a frontier lab or have you just paid a lot of money to remove a competitor from the market?
When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.
In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?
> achieve AGI
They might as well invest in cold fusion, warm superconductivity, curing cancer or whatever sci-fi concept you have.
Were you not paying attention? Modern LLMs are incredibly general AIs, and nearing human or superhuman performance in many areas. And the tech just keeps advancing.
If you don't see "AGI is possible", you aren't looking.
Make a ship sail against the wind by lighting a bonfire under her deck???
Norway doesn't have to fund future capex just like OpenAI doesn't have to fund future capex. They both borrow the capital.
We see in practice that the last to adopt technology do in fact have newer tech than the ones who started it. IE 3G in Asia vs land lines in USA.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
OpenAI is worth $800B because that’s what the last funding round valued it at. It does not mean that >50% of existing shareholders will agree to sell for that amount. If a serious buyer does emerge they will likely hold out for 2x that, maybe more.
OpenAI is worth the discounted value of their future free cash flow. It's not clear at this point how much free cash flow they will ever generate, if any.
Might be negative.
Do you mean that there is no way to value OpenAI for a purchase so a sale is impossible?
At the least OpenAI is worth what the market is willing to pay for it.
OpenAI is worth whatever someone will pay for them. Overpriced and underpriced are just words. If someone's willing to pay an amount for something, that's what it's worth.
Well, yes but not really.
I could buy a local sweetshop for a 100 billion dollars, just because I might do that, that doesn't mean it's actually worth that.
Real world example: someone just bought the first Ferrari Luce EV for $40M. Obv $600K starting price for that model was low!
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ferrar...
On the contrary, you would be demonstrating that, to at least one buyer, it was worth that. By definition.
I think the argument you’re really looking to contradict is this: if 1% of a company is worth $1B to somebody, then somebody would pay $100B for the whole company. That does not follow (and indeed the acquisition price of a company is almost never exactly its “market valuation”).
No.
You are assuming that the money that I buy the sweet shop for is what I evaluate the value of the sweet shop to be worth. That's not necessarily true.
You're also assuming I'm not insane.
If I offer to buy an apple from you for 1 trillion dollars because I believe consuming that specific apple will make me a god, that apple is not actually worth 1 trillion dollars.
Items don’t have an inherent “worth”.
If I have an apple and you agree to buy it for $1T, then the apple is indeed worth $1T at that moment.
After the purchase is complete it is worth ~$0, or whatever the next person is willing to pay you for it.
Alternatively you can say “it is still worth $1T to me” and that would be true as well.
When we are specifically talking about companies, their value is where buyers meet sellers in the order book.
Yes it's literally what it means. It was worth that to you (even if just to prove a point).
What else does worth mean?
Okay.
I buy a sweetshop for 1 billion dollars.
Now, immediately after I have bought it, what's it worth?
and just what the fuck is ""worth"" anyway
"We're selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price."
Not to mention that the US would have to approve the sale to another country, which they are unlikely to do.
Possibly, they could also sell assets and cease operation.
Selling the assets would probably be liable to similar restrictions.
Or 2x less. 800B valued is not 800B invested. And it wouldn't be the first time investors sell at a loss if sentiment declines.
I would agree with this, except it sits on the thesis that one company really has that much of an impact. I don't think it actually does. AI is here and it will continue to progress. Norway controlling OpenAI is not going to change it's trajectory -- the cat is already out of the bag.
That's a really unfortunate framing. The cat isn't out of the bag; otherwise, there wouldn't be efforts to scale up data centers to support forecasted demand.
The inevitability narrative is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it ends if we decide not to keep telling it.
I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of 'the cat is out of the bag', although I also think the OP misunderstands it, too.
The saying means that you can't un-tell a secret... once a secret is known to the public, you can't make it a secret again.
I think the more appropriate saying would be a similar, but slightly different, one: "That ship has already sailed"
That one is more about "it is too late to do anything about this" and less about information.
"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!
No, doesn't mean that either.
People would sell piglets and would try to sell "a pig in a poke" (where a poke is a bag).
That's why you don't buy a pig in a poke because you can't see what you're buying.
Letting the cat out of the bag is because you've revealed that it was a cat rather than a piglet. You've revealed the deception.
Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.
> it ends if we decide not to keep telling it
That's wishful thinking, what are you saying, labs/people across the world will selflessly decide they're not going to pursue further research if we on HN stop saying it?
With open models and the work happening outside of Anthropic and OpenAI, the cat is most definitely out of the bag.
Yudkowsky's solution of detecting and physically shutting down non complying datacenter, including bombing if the country doesn't cooperate, isn't too much out of the question.
We would have done the same if it is about virus or nuclear weapons, and AI could become serious existential threat in the next 5 years.
More or less of an existential threat than a conflict between nuclear powers because one of them decided to launch a unilateral strike against a datacentre located outside one of their cities just in case it hosted a particularly dangerous chatbot?
Do you think it's possible to bomb China's AI datacenters? They are already here, and they are progressing AI at their will. What will others do about it?
In the history of the world, one company can absolutely have world changing impact. From the British East India company to Kodak to Google, one company can have that much of an impact. Whether OpenAI is such a company is a different question for future history books to decide, but that part of their thesis at least is borne out by history.
I doubt that if Norway buys OpenAI, it will be the company that captures the value.
There is no inherent property to those model makers that they will capture the value of the AI boom. The model companies have a lot of competition from chinese models. Of course the US government will likely still keep some model makers alive (just alone for DOD supply chain reasons), but the chinese models will certainly compress margins.
It might as well be a chipmaker, a power company or a cobalt mining company.
Ultimately, it's up to the US government to decide if OpenAI can capture the value provided by AI: if chinese models get banned from the F500, then maybe one of america's famous duopolies can establish themselves.
But this hinges on congress mostly to pass certain laws to put OpenAI into that position. But which value does congress have? If OpenAI is owned by a bunch of Forbes 400 people like right now, then of course those will lobby the hell out of congress and ensure their stakes in OpenAI make them extremely rich.
But Norway doesn't have that access to lawmakers, they would see it as external influence by an alien power. They can certainly benefit from this trend though by being a shareholder.
To give a concrete example of the US government making life hard for foreign investors, take the T-mobile and sprint merger. T-mobile is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, whose biggest shareholder are various institutions of the german federal government.
In this case, the US government just had to _approve_ the purchase, something very standard that happens all the time, but they still dragged that approval out as long as possible, even though Germany is a fellow NATO country.
Why on earth would Norway do a charity to the world? The oil fund while it has some moral guidelines, profit making is still the primary goal. There is no guarantee OpenAI will be profitable ever.
Yes, and I think you would get much more effect by going for much smaller and cheaper firms.
Cerebras is only 700 people. I wouldn't buy it, but since it's only 700 people, you can probably build something like it with 1400 people in a couple of years if you set the goals right and hire the right people to lead it.
Euclyd, VSORA etc. exist. If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Then once one has good hardware without an enormous markup, then one can start thinking about building LLMs with it.
Wasn't Groq acqui-hired by NVIDIA?
Yes, I suppose I wrote this a year late. But again, Euclyd and VSORA. Probably basically the same thing but better.
> If they were buying American, why not Groq.
Because they're too stupid and stubborn to rename themselves.
There are definitely some weird mass psychological movements on the internet right now and I basically view this post as a wishcasting outcropping of this, stories the disempowered tell themselves.
Nothing special about OpenAI to deserve a buyout.
And what would they do with it. Lock it up like the oil and natural gas? As much as there’s praise here for their achievements in green tech adoption, if you’re an immigrant in Norway, you realise how hermetic this society really is. It’s not great for outsiders.
People on the internet have some weird fantasy. News at 6.
Seriously why would Norway do that? With a fraction of that amount of money they can build energy and computing facilities. They can distill OpenAI models. Why would that bet all on one single company?
The US won't let Norway do that anyway. Biden blocked Japan's Nippon Steel from buying US Steel[0]:
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vz83pg9eo
And Greenland should buy Anthropic!
Canada can buy either Microsoft or Amazon, Europe buys the other.
The USA vs Rest Of World problem: solved.
If AI has a negative impact on employment as some think then AI should be required to fund free college for everyone that wants it. Then the schools can have a strict rule that only limited AI can be used during your education.
Then set up a pipeline between the human generated content from the colleges back into future AI models. Everyone gets an education and there is ongoing non AI training data to advance AI without any model collapse.
>If AI has a negative impact on employment as some think then AI should be required to fund free college for everyone that wants it.
If AI really becomes effective enough to displace so many white collar jobs then it'd be far more efficient to fund free AI tutoring for everyone that wants it. A system where you get at best an hour daily of discussion with a human expert is grossly inferior to one where you can have 24/7 discussion with an AI expert that has infinite patience for dumb questions. There'd be no reason for college to exist in a future where AI professors are at least as smart as human professors but far far cheaper.
No I think OpenAI deserves a meaningful valuation reset, but they are in a better potential strategy then Anthropic - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-struggle-of-openai/
> Their best bet is hardware
Why would Nvidia continue to finance OpenAI to meet its procurement commitments if it became a direct competitor?
Where is the money coming from?
Norway could just start a European AI company (or even just a Microsoft replacement).
OpenAI is a mess.
Start with a fresh slate, using open models and you can actually build a company that makes sense.
What a spectacularly terrible investment that would be.
It doesn't matter what the valuation is, they won't raise the money to meet their procurement commitments without circular financing. Why would a sovereign wealth fund step in to meet those commitments?
The financials of OpenAI make no sense at all unless you're a True Believer.
Whole country now part of bubble gum. Instead, get in touch with ASML and build chips. Lower level technology is getting more and important even look easy (it's not), nowadays limited companies achive.
And Denmark should buy Anthropic.
“Invade Greenland and we switch it off!”
Talk about perverse incentives.
The gematria[0] of Norway is 96, while it's 60 for OpenAI. The deal is never gonna work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
"Breaking News: Sam Altman has installed himself as dictator of Norway"
j/k. I love the outside of the box thinking here, but that doesn't seem like what the annuity was setup for. Of course thats up to Norway.
This must be satire? Makes no sense. OpenAI isn't worth anywhere close to $800B. The gap to open models is shrinking fast, and it seems that many companies will have models with around the same capabilities.
And have you guys seen the compression ratio of models capabilities? The new Qwen3.8 27B is insane. I can run it at 85-95 tokens per second on my personal PC, and it is, according to artificial analysis benchmarks, around the same level as GPT 5.4 xhigh from march, OpenAIs leading model at that time.
If things keep going this way, OpenAI and it's infrastructure is worth...very little.
Echoes of the Darian Scheme somehow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
So you want it to end with Norway essentially coerced out of financial stress to join the US as a junior partner?
Buy a failing, over-hyped, collateral-less company with pension money. F-no!
No it should not it would be better if it saves norweigan retirement funds for the future.
Yes, but wait for the dip.
FYI "Silicon Valley" is a bunch of of different ppl. Quite a few. Operating in some totally separate day-to-day environments. Flippant comments rise to top because they are clickbait.
Then Norway will be holding the multibillion dollar bag once AI flops
Yeah, I think a crisis in unavoidable.
Great technology, but $20-$200 a month technology, with a lot of people going for free options. Like the telecom industry. Average is probably going to be like a phone bill. Basically: you can become Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile. $450 billion a year in revenue. A superb business, but merely a superb business.
Their valuations arent based on the 20-200 subs but enterprise customers
So, for OpenAI 60-100 instead of 20-200. It seems pretty much the same.
It is much better to buy kimi or glm and provide them gpu...
OpenAI will likely not IPO this year because their numbers are so poor compared to those of Anthropic's. However if they don't IPO, they cannot pay for all those datacenters they ordered.
Meanwhile, Chinese companies are creating SOTA models and make them available for free, strongly limiting the amount of money that OpenAI and Anthropic can demand for their similar models via API. Their sky high valuations are likely to suffer as chinese models are considered "good enough" and safe to use when hosted in the West. They even have fewer safeguards and are thus more suitable for cybersecurity tasks.
tl;dr: They're fucked. Don't buy them.
Very different races.
The incentives in north america favor software-esque plays where the players are racing towards % of marketshare based on usage.
China on the other hand is driving towards winning of manufacturing and % of hardware produced by them. China is competing with Nvidia, OpenAi and Anthropic are collateral damage.
Don't worry, AI companies and the companies around them have ensured that so much of the US economy is tied into AI that they've become Too Big to Fail, so that when things eventually collapse the US government will give them trillions of dollars without asking anything in return. That will allow them to socialize their irresponsible spending and wipe the red out of their ledgers so that they can focus on destroying the environment at massive scale.
FUD that they might be bought and controlled by foreigners, then offer a good slice to the US government (maybe they put you as part of the Army), and you become non-bankruptable.
Wouldn't be needlessly expensive and risky before the bubble pops? Just buy the scraps after it pops and If it's not bubble, they can alternatively just buy a fab dedicate its output to build ridiculously large infrastructure in Norway and power it with their wast hydro and wind sources, then bring the talent by providing freedom and resource access.
Why Norway? Why not Saudi Arabia?
This is the entire purpose of the AGI society which is 19 years old and has an annual conference that had 300 in person attendees and 4000 online this year
https://joinagisociety.org
I just took over as society executive director specifically focused on the issues from this article: bridging that gap
You can see our discussion here:
https://youtu.be/pxcL4j5kTg4
The announcement at AGI 26 a few weeks ago which starts at 19:00
https://www.youtube.com/live/qRA1DoMCCSc?si=a2DJeT1vi0JoaWnY
I disagree, that would open up OpenAI to all sorts of EU regulations, rules and laws that prevents something like OpenAI to even be possible. Also the consumer would get less for higher price as increased costs are passed to them.
Norway's fund would first have to definitively find out what it takes to actually run all of OpenAI's compute. Monetarily wise. We still don't know that number.
Isn't OpenAI running on investor money right now?
This would be an interesting way for Europe to maintain AI sovereignty. US would block it though.
In the article it's suggested that Norway could award a peace prize to trump in return for regulatory approval.
100% the US government would maintain that AI is the key to the success of the US economy over China, and that it can only happen as long as it's run by profiteering billionaires aiming to extract money from society at the fastest rate possible. Only by accelerating ecological collapse for profit can private US capitalism maintain its edge over freely shared Chinese open-weight models.
Bro we are talking about using Norway's 2 trillion dollar oil and natural gas surplus to buy OpenAI. Nobody has the environmental high ground here.
assuming this is serious, I would eat a tire if the US government allowed that to happen
In the article it's suggested that Norway could award a peace prize to trump in return for regulatory approval.
OpenAI marketing team's getting pretty innovative huh?
Nice try inflating the IPO valuation. :)
The entire EU and Norway could simply block all clankers and US propaganda and experience an intellectual renaissance. For $0.
Why try to tank Norwegian pensions by having them buy OpenAI before the LLM capital expenditure bubble bursts? 8-\
OpenAI has a very limited amount of time before their value collapses in the face of cheap Chinese models. The price war is just getting started. It won't be pretty.
Can we fastforward to that point so I can buy some GPUs at non-inflated prices? It is insane how fast they are going up. I bought some stuff last week and it is already up $1K compared to then. And I thought it was overpriced when I got it.
Unfortunately the deflation of OpenAI would not lower your GPU prices. People will still require the hardware to run LLMs, it's just that it will probably be commodity models.
Fastest way to burn $800 billion. Even the Chinese government isn't nationalizing its AI companies, because there's no chance a cutting edge technology company can remain competitive when run by bureaucrats.
More importantly, openly shared public-weight models limits the scale of the success that closed-weight private AI services can manage. Eventually it'll become cheaper and easier to pay some AI data centre to use their capacity plus an open-source harness rather than to pay Anthropic to pay an AI data centre etc. etc.
IOW China almost definitely sees their own open-weight models as a pressure release valve to ensure the US AI companies, and by extension the US economy, doesn't get too big, and to ensure that these companies don't become the dominant global force (the way that e.g. US cloud companies did originally).
100% this. I would assume if any government purchased an ai company and wasn't completely hands off (which from the sound of this post, it wouldn't be), I would assume that company would fail.
Could it be that the goal is not to be competitive, but to be responsible?
They're responsible for the Norwegian people's retirement savings, and burning $800 billion of it just to render an American AI company uncompetitive is not that.
"Teacher, teacher! I think that Norway should buy all the weapons in the world and then we wouldn't have any more wars."
How can somebody put their own name on something so infantile as this article? What influence does this author or any of you think you have over the Norwegian sovereign fund?
I stopped reading when I saw "Social-Democracy" and Palestine in the article.
Are you operating on a purely keyword-based level?
It became clear that the article isn't about OpenAI or technology, it's left-wing propaganda.
lol can't tell if this is serious
Going by the author's other articles, if it's a bit it's a long one.
Pretty sure this is satire. Maybe it alludes to recent concerns that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund could be exposed to an AI-driven investment bubble or valuation correction.
Yeah I can’t say either. I cannot imagine what the current political machine in Norway would do with it but nothing good and they would run it into the ground. When it comes to Ethics maybe read up on Telenor and Burma.
And everyone should just get along. And software should just work perfectly. And everything should be free.
What's the point of writing something like this? Surely the writer isn't delusional enough to actually expect this to affect state leadership decision-making?
The author does have this bio at the bottom:
A guest post by Zachary Jones “My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
Norway can’t buy OpenAI since it’s not GDPR compliant.
Wow, this is the dumbest thing I've read in the whole year, but I love that the internet should give a voice to anybody and everybody and would defend this right to (perhaps) death.
Author seems to have read on a magazine or something that Norway's Pension Fund assets amount to ~2 trillion US, which he confuses for having 2 trillion US cash but you cannot really expect much from room temperature IQ.
Then, just because 2,000B US > 800B US, he goes on to propose that Norway should buy it ... that's it, that's the whole argument.
Then he elaborates with some of the most deranged ideas I've read like (taken verbatim):
"Such an intervention would clearly be blocked by the United States government, though if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awards Trump the bauble then perhaps there will be an opening of political possibility."
As if Norway would even be remotely interested in acquiring that company anyway.
according to my understanding, this would (necessarily) include relocation of all OAI stuff to .. somewhere in Europa? (regardless if this "somewhere" is FR or UK or IT or DE or CH))
I do not see any chance that this may happen