I think it's because the private market can't possibly go any higher. OpenAI is already valued at around $1 trillion and just raised $122b.

The only next step is the public market.

That's not how money works. It's not an asset which is subject to conservation of matter like gold.

Banks make money by giving out loans is a meme, but it's actually true here. You kind of need collateral to do that, but a stock of a company which has revenue is a perfectly cromulent collateral even by strict standards. It's not even some infinite money glitch - it's kinda how the whole system is supposed to work.

The stock market is largely about betting on expectations of future value while money is just a token which is used to settle things. E.g. if you think about simplified mechanics of IPO, say, investor Alice buys OpenAI shares, OpenAI gets the money and Alice has shares. If for simplicity we assume that Alice and OpenAI use same bank and there are no intermediaries, then it literally just updates two cells in a database. And Alice now has shares which is an asset of known value, thus can be borrowed against, etc. Also, say, OpenAI can use that money to repay debt, then perhaps lender would buy SpaceX stocks - it's not like money was withdrawn from the system.

Of course, there can be some interference: multiple companies do IPO around same time it would reduce FOMO, and if they did it literally in one day there might be lack of liquidity.

> free market concept should move the prices down

Kind of a radical idea. I did read about that in economy books way back when at uni... but I don't think it's really happening actual. At least my walled doesn't seem to get it.

PS: it's a joke, free market works when there is competition. VCs are making damn sure it's just enough monopolies that they get wealthier while consumers themselves get milked. Without antitrust actually being enforced, there is no free market.

Since it appears that LLMs can't achieve AGI and lose hallucinations, I presume a new company will appear with a new architecture that can - what happens to the current behemoths and their stock prices? Will they jump architectures?

Splendidly interesting times.

This is also my understanding of why Twitter (and thus Grok) was acquired by SpaceX (which was already having an IPO). Less to do with GPUs in space, more to do with the first way to invest 'directly in AI companies without a proxy (e.g. nvidia).

Don't worry, the Fed can create infinite money!