‘I’m just stuck’: Meet the former OpenAI researcher sitting on $700K of equity that he says is overvalued

Andrew Ho left OpenAI after eight months on Wednesday, as the former researcher announced on X that he was starting a company to sell high-end reinforcement learning datasets to frontier AI labs.

Around 5 a.m. the next morning, still awake, Ho posted some advice for the colleagues he’d left behind: take the money while you can. The frontier labs, he wrote, are overvalued.

“I would strongly recommend taking liquidity if you’re eligible for tender offers,” Ho wrote. “It seems somewhat implausible that the valuation is going to, like, 2x after the IPO, but it does certainly seem plausible that it could go down by 50%.”

By the time he woke up, the posts had drawn hundreds of thousands of anxious eyes, having arrived in the middle of a tech selloff that had pushed the Nasdaq 100 into correction the day before. “It was kind of remarkable,” Ho said in an interview with Fortune Thursday.

He said he has about $700K in shares that he’s not legally allowed to sell until after the IPO and lockup period. “So I’m just stuck,” he said. 

So even if he’s talking against his own book, Ho is publicly standing on business. Like most in the industry, he believes that demand for inference will rise dramatically;  that there will be a compute crunch soon; that the data center buildout is necessary. But what he’s “paranoid” about is that competition from cheap models is forcing frontier labs onto ...