[to11mtm]

The timing of all of these IPOs has a smell similar to both the US Mortgage company trend shortly before interest rates spiked and all those companies started shedding jobs progressively since, and/or the DotCom IPO boom.

Where we land remains to be seen.

[gekoxyz]

While I agree on the smell I think that the situations are really different. I am not an economist but I think that other than the situation of the huge amount of money in play we are in a really different case. The general user (and I have noticed it especially with today's WWDC) basically doesn't get any benefit from AI (neither LLMs, image generation or photo editing). They were promised living like in Wall-e in 5 years and they are basically still living the same life. White collar jobs slightly benefited from the LLMs and same with programmers (while many say that they can get huge leverage the public results of what software companies produce didn't get the same benefit). Everyone knows the market will crash, nobody knows how much.

[base698]

My father in law owns a small manufacturing business and is not technical at all. His computer skills stop with some CAD and basic excel. He pays for ChatGPT as does his wife and her kids. The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product. Almost every coffee shop I go to has people talking about AI and ChatGPT even in areas with no tech populations.

I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.

[jrmg]

The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product

The dot com bubble was basically based on regular people buying computers and internet service, and then using them to buy products they used to buy in stores.

[mmcwilliams]

This seems to ignore the fact that millions of non-technical people did pay cash for a product: AOL. And in fact the AOL buyout of Time Warner coincided almost exactly with burst of the dot com boom.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the AOL buyout of Time Warner

To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.

[LargeWu]

These companies are never, ever going to make their money back off of retail customers. It's not even clear if those customers would be profitable at all, let alone enough to justify hundreds of billions in capital expenditures.

[100ms]

The question in my mind is persistence. Everyone goes through the honeymoon phase. I'm absolutely loathing the idea that phones are arriving soon with chatbot junk built deeply into it, enough that the thought is more what if I could maybe just stop using my phone so much. I threw myself at the Llama WhatsApp integration when I first got it, now the idea of having Llama in WhatsApp just feels so dumb.

I was a huge early fan of ChatGPT voice too, but I don't think I've used voice mode anywhere in at least 6 months. The question is what is the right level people are generally going to settle on for the use of these tools in the long term. 80% of my usage isn't much more than a better Google, I could live without it and I could live with cheaper options. I'm not sure the consumer money is going to be there en masse as hoped

Of course it still leaves a huge amount of business cases open, but I suppose the same principle applies. How soon will people tire of talking to robo-voice when they call their bank? etc.

[Waterluvian]

I definitely believe in the broad existence of people like your father in law. What I’m not sure about is how many of them would keep paying if their subscriptions were priced profitably.

[hypendev]

I wouldn't argue the same.

My parents love using ChatGPT, asking it all kinds of questions. My mom discovered Claude and helps her immensely with her job - where she would have to take it home and work a few hours to be able to finish the tasks on her computer, as her company that still uses Office 98, now Claude does it in 5 minutes.

They fixed so many random issues using it, it is insane. My dad had a bike issue which would otherwise be solved by either trying to find obscure manuals from 20 years ago on random forums with me translating it from english to our language, or by taking it to a mechanic which could take months. This way, he just snapped a few photos, said what the problem is, and in a few minutes he had the fix.

I've built software that uses LLM's for a specific usecase - besides general adoption, professionals in the field contacted me and thanked me for making their lives easier, as the tasks would often take a lot of manual work. These people are earning way more from using my software, than I am from their subscriptions, which is still about 20x more than my API costs are.

While most non-dev people are behind the curve, the impact it has on their lives is becoming bigger and bigger by the day.

[gekoxyz]

Maybe I downplayed it too much but I really think this is still "in distribution" (we always have to remember that we are tech savy people and we influence the people that surround us). I see the value, but in my opinion it's not a generational opportunity, but a great acceleration. We are treating it like generational opportunity. That's why I say "everyone know there will be a crash, but noone knows how big that will be". The AI industry is not (in my opinion obviously) worth $ 391B [1] of added value.

[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artifici...

[hypendev]

It is still "in distribution", that is why when its "distributed" properly, it will surely add much, much more value to the economy.

But it is a generational opportunity - we can remove a lot of barriers that come with knowledge, lack of it, access to it and more. Someone can easily get pretty on point medical advice without access to doctors. Get specific engineering advice without engaging with those engineers. We can apply common sense or specific knowledge on scale - in a world where about 50% of people have IQ under 100 and access to knowledge is gated behind lines and payments, this has a huge chance ot improve their lives.

And there is the whole shadow inference economy - just for example, a few corporations I have worked with in insurance and telecommunications have been slowly introducing it inside their workflows and their data tooling, being able to clean data, tag it, analyse it in a way that before would probably cost them billons in human costs.

One of them has a database going back to the 80's, with data being formatted and reformatted in all shapes and sizes, coming back all the way from paper records for some of their oldest clients. Cleaning this up was unimaginable before as a "something we can do in a day" project, but was more of a "possible with insane costs". This lead to all further activity being shaped by decisions someone made 40+ years ago, details being lost, data being thrown away or saved in random notes.

And there's millions of companies like that all around the world, which can now do "impossible" and become much more efficient and productive for a much cheaper price and in way less time than ever.

[magarnicle]

Office 98

[hypendev]

Sorry, my bad, might be 97 running on windows 98 - but yes, this is a giant corporation serving hundreds of corporate customers and a few hundred thousand private ones, using nearly 30 years old software because the management does not see reasons to upgrade and spend the extra cost associated with it. New machines and Windows XP are only used by upper management.

Worst part?

Their whole software stack is running on some version of Visual Basic, written by a dude that did not trust "others code" so he wrote everything from scratch, and retired about 5 years ago.

Nobody knows how any of it works, or has any clue. The company will continue to run it and pay him for consultations as long as he is able to do it.

[magarnicle]

Glad to hear that upper management are keeping up with the times, at least.

[charcircuit]

There is ton of utility. I use it all the time to study, to look up what's happening in the world, to understand the context behind what others are saying, cooking recipes, and much more. Considering LLMs have access to tools for searching the internet they have a superset of the capabilities of Google and consumers got a lot of value from Google. In fact from putting ads on the search results Google has made billions of dollars from such consumers getting value from their service.

[Eufrat]

When you ask it to give you a digest of current events or as a study aid how are you ensuring that what your reading is a valid representation of the source material? Has it never given you false information?

[thimabi]

Not OP but, anyway, AI output should be treated like any other source material.

I study from reputable sources every day and never cease to be amazed by how many errors or misconceptions they have. Peer-reviewed articles, books from renowned scholars, news from major publications… regardless of the source, false information and contradictions accumulate. I’d wager that AI, besides helping me uncover these issues in the literature, has had a lower error rate than most of the materials that I read on a daily basis.

[charcircuit]

I can tell by my intuition. If I'm that interested in something I can dig deeper or just give up in pursing the truth.

[jghn]

> I think that the situations are really different

Keep in mind that people said this before both of those crashes.That's the problem with bubbles. It's impossible to say if this time really IS different.

[siren2026]

Ben Felix got a great video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOyFja87uyw

The point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market. Which make sense I guess.

But the fact that the 3 of them are hitting the public market at the same time means they all came to the conclusion that now is the perfect time to unload those shares. Probably because they know there is a high chance of a big crash coming after.

I will not touch those IPOs with a 10 feet long pole. But unfortunately a lot of people are about to get burned.

My prediction is that this is what will be remembered as the last bit of exuberance before everything starts to unravel.

Books will be written about how insiders will be profiting millions by unloading those shares to the greatest fools and middle class america.

[JumpCrisscross]

> point he makes is that companies go public when they think they can get the maximum our of their shares on the retail market

I think this is what's going on right now. But there are a variety of reasons that can drive IPO timing. Need for cash and owners needing liquidity being chief among them.

I'd also say that post-Covid, retail has become a commanding section of the American equity markets in a way I don't think they've been in my lifetime. As a result, every IPO from now on will have to target retail.

[siren2026]

Both OpenAI and Anthropic were able to raise astronomical amount of cash on the private markets just weeks ago. I don't think that's what's driving them.

I really think what is driving this is the need for insiders, employees, early investors to be able to sell their stock at scale before the music stops.

And You can only do that through a full IPO. All those companies had private secondary transaction but none of them were big enough to transfer the Trillions of $ required for the insiders to unload their bags.

[JumpCrisscross]

> what is driving this is the need for insiders, employees, early investors to be able to sell their stock at scale before the music stops

How would you differentiate insiders needing to sell versus insiders needing to dump before a crash?

I remember when Uber and Airbnb and WeWork went public in quick succession. There were similar claims. WeWork never made it public. And Uber and Airbnb's IPO investors made of fantastically.

[siren2026]

> How would you differentiate insiders needing to sell versus insiders needing to dump before a crash?

To answer this, just ask yourself how many of the insiders would have bought the stock at current IPO's price? Most insiders would probably never touch those stocks at this price. I know a couple people at OpenAI and Anthropic that are very clearly selling everything they can as soon as they can.

This is all a carefully orchestrated PR game that is relying on retail to be the ultimate fool. I guess to some level every IPO is like that (A PR game to hype the company).

But never before had we 3 mega IPOs happening at almost the exact same time with so much money to unload on retails with dubious ways to force funds to gobble them.

Most IPOs end up negative after the first few quarters (at least compared to the SP500). When we are talking about a 20B$ company it matters less than 5T$ being suddenly fully unloaded on the public.

> And Uber and Airbnb's IPO investors made of fantastically.

Did they? https://www.alphaspread.com/comparison/nasdaq/abnb/vs/indx/g...

The only way they might have is by getting the shares at the actual IPO price, and even then it's around the same as the SP500 return since then.

[s1artibartfast]

Is it bad for insiders to want out? Is it bad for owners to sell when they think it is overpriced?

I think this is extremely common, if not necessary, part of a functioning market and price discovery. It happens with not just IPOs but also secondary offerings.

Some of this seems like dumb retail wanting to toughtlessly buy without consideration of risk.

[JumpCrisscross]

> couple people at OpenAI and Anthropic that are very clearly selling everything they can as soon as they can

If you are serious about this for Anthropic please drop me a line. (Not OpenAI.)

> never before had we 3 mega IPOs happening at almost the exact same time

Uber (May 2019), Airbnb (December 2020) and WeWork (scheduled 2019, SPAC 2021) were pretty closely bunched. And they were big for their time. Keep in mind that the money supply has expanded since then.

> Most IPOs end up negative after the first few quarters

Source?

[teaearlgraycold]

I’m also staying away. I need to not lose money more than I need to gain money.

[HerbManic]

One of the stranger theories I have seen is that it is based on Astrology as there is a confluence of Uranus squaring the lunar nodes... whatever that means. There is a saying supposedly attributed to JP Morgan (but not likely) "Millionaires don't use astrology but Billionaires do."

One of the more rational ideas I have seen of any kind of divination is that it provides a means of passing judgement over to a near seemingly random system. If you are reading tea leaves, doing an 'I Ching' divination, biobliomancy etc. that essentially provides a coin flip to make you go 'yes' or 'no' to an opportunity.

[science4sail]

Indeed, there are several anthropological works speculating that the purpose of divination is to break analysis paralysis or unconscious biases.

And if you are already sure of the correct solution, then you can just keep doing the divination over and over again until the gods give the answers that you want!

[xyst]

Got to payout the investors before the burst

[jtolmar]

There was a similar wave of IPOs with Uber and AirB&B, not tied to a bubble popping.

(I mean, I think this looks incredibly like a bubble too, but for completeness sake, that's the counterexample I can think of.)

[ai-x]

The content of all these comments has a smell similar to 2023 when NVDA had a spectacular run and HN was absolutely sure that AI is a bubble.

It's also similar to 2024 when HN was sure that AI is a bubble.

Similar to 2025 when HN commentators were sure that AI is a bubble.

1000% gains later, HN will continue to identify patterns of 2000/2008 and are absolutely convinced it is a bubble

Note: If a company gains 1000% and loses 50%, you can't claim you were right.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have already gained 1000% since 2023 (In Anthropic's case almost 10,000%)

[awwaiid]

Yes, many companies going out of business altogether, some of them large, is what a bubble pop would look like. As opposed to a uh.... Correction.

[ai-x]

The ARR of OpenAI + Anthropic > $85B greater than McDonalds, Netflix, Starbucks, Google Cloud, CocaCola, and 1000 other iconic firms around the world.

If I wanted blind pattern matching comments of dot-com bubble, I can just ask LLMs of 2023 like ChatGPT 3.5

[siren2026]

Depending on how much that bubble will pop, all of those above might still be very right.

We could very well go back to the 2021 valuations.

[ai-x]

If it doesn't, at what point will the 'bears' admit they were horribly and confidently wrong?