I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to support mobile.

How could OpenAI possibly be worth 80 billion USD when Facebook offers a self-hosting alternative for free?

I still haven't seen this tech do anything mind-blowing. Most of the programming stuff doesn't feel much fancier than a good IDE and a quick online search. I use it now and then for tweaking important docs, but that's about it. It kinda feels like another crypto hype meme that will just eat up time and money.

I don't see how its value has gone up

since it was worth $20 billion, bullish signs are that it remains top of the heap among LLM companies and has managed to scale with demand.

Bearish signs are that peak interest in LLMs is already over, AI search is not popular, hoped-for applications in software development and writing have not materialized, serious resistance to AI is already here with the WGA strike, Andreessen Horowitz is hyping it up.

Edit: I think some of the people replying are not remembering what the hype was like around the time of OpenAI's last major fundraising. Social media feeds like Twitter, Reddit, and HN were absolutely swarming with LLM content. People were seriously saying that this technology was AGI. That it had human-level performance on many tasks and would soon replace working professionals. Serious analysts expected Microsoft's AI-powered search to cut into Google's market share, to such an extent that Google shares lost value.

LLMs are still useful and may eventually be so useful that they even justify this valuation, but I just don't see how we are in a more hopeful world today, knowing that LLMs can not yet replace real professionals, that LLM-derived content was a short-lived fad on social media, that Google's marketshare is steady, etc.