Ex-OpenAI Staffer Urges Colleagues to Cash Out, Warns Lab Valuations May Halve
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-01
Former OpenAI technical staff member Andrew Ho is publicly urging his ex-colleagues to cash out their equity rather than waiting for an IPO. He believes current valuations of frontier AI labs are built on overly optimistic expectations and could be halved if the market returns to rationality.
Ho argues that while private markets pay for the distant dream of AGI, the public market only values cash flow and profit. Even with an 80% gross margin and a 20x P/E ratio, justifying a $1 trillion valuation would require $100B–$200B in annual revenue. Meanwhile, under the "Red Queen" race, model training costs are rising faster than revenues, and open-source models continue to drive down API prices.
Despite his bearish view on lab valuations, Ho remains optimistic about AI itself. He believes the next bottleneck will be high-quality training data and has founded a startup dedicated to providing RL datasets for frontier labs.
Related event: Ex-OpenAI Employee Warns of AI Lab Valuation Bubble, Urges Cashing Out(6 posts)→
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