The Venn diagram of people who have deep understanding of capital markets and people who like betting on stuff will have non-negligible overlap. Read some of the stories about Wall Street, especially from before it was all algorithms. Moreover, evidence of apparent insider trading on Polymarket, specifically for OpenAI, has already been shared on HN. Sounds pretty crazy to me to suggest that those odds can't tell us anything about the true probabilities. What's your reasoning?

> What is this supposed to imply?

Wisdom of the crowd, same as guessing jellybeans in a jar. The exact average is wrong, but it's still pretty damn close because the guesses are likely to follow a normal distribution.

If the hump of the normal distribution of these guesses is around 4% (or whatever) odds on, the actual answer is unlikely to be far from that.

> You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting without understanding who is betting and why.

Irrelevant; Polymarket is the reflection of the bettors view. When they place their bets, they don't care which way this goes, they only care to predict the direction correctly.

Unfortunately, it could be a case of the tail wagging the dog - even if the IPO would have been successful without polymarket existing, now that they have a signal from polymarket it is likely to be used as one of the weightings when they determine the correct time to IPO.

It’s legalised insider trading. So you can always assume at this point that someone who knows will be cashing out.

"polymarket customers think they have some alpha over other consumers on this topic"

Or even less charitable,

"People susceptible to gambling have been manipulated into spending money on this"

It only has $1m volume, so even that conclusion is a bit of a stretch. By comparison NCAA tournament has $15m, and US confirms aliens this year has $18m.

That Polymarket traders believe an OpenAI IPO this quarter, or even this year, is unlikely (or else almost all of them are hedging, e.g. long on other AI stocks. Which seems unlikely.)

Anyone who thinks that position is wrong and it's >4% likely has a clear profit opportunity.