The AI doom and gloom is so weird, and it's just turning into a bizarre echo chamber. AI is orders of magnitude more useful and transformative than Facebook was in 2005, and Meta is now one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Even if OpenAI has a down round or defaults on some loans, the technology has already proven to have dozens upon dozens of practical applications.
Where is the actual financial modelling? This is pure speculation?
I understand being bearish and frightened of AI but this accounts for absolutely NOTHING, and especially doesn't include any projections on potential ad revenue which is likely going to be huge given their DAU and what you can extrapolate their ARPU to be based on other big tech advertisers.
This doesn’t feel like news to me? A tech startup that has 18 months of runway is pretty good honestly. The story is the quantity of cash involved in that runway.
Edit: Startup might be the wrong term but Uber raised money every 18months at least for 10 years till it was finally profitable in 2023. My point is more that saying an unprofitable but massive company only has 18months of cash isn’t a new development. The new development is that the 18 months of cash is an order or two of magnitude more than prior companies.
This looks less like an AI failure and more like a compute economics problem. Frontier labs are chasing marginal model gains that require exponentially more GPUs, power, and capex, so burn rates explode even if demand grows. Centralized hyperscale data centers concentrate that risk on a few balance sheets. An alternative is treating AI as a distributed workload problem—using spot or decentralized GPU markets (io.net, Akash, etc.) to tap existing idle capacity instead of financing trillion-dollar builds. You trade enterprise SLAs for lower capex exposure, but structurally it changes the cost curve.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] thread1/ Implement more aggressive advertising 2/ Stop training new models 3/ Raise more funding
This is pretty normal for a fast-growing startup, although OpenAI may be the largest to ever do it.
I understand being bearish and frightened of AI but this accounts for absolutely NOTHING, and especially doesn't include any projections on potential ad revenue which is likely going to be huge given their DAU and what you can extrapolate their ARPU to be based on other big tech advertisers.
Edit: Startup might be the wrong term but Uber raised money every 18months at least for 10 years till it was finally profitable in 2023. My point is more that saying an unprofitable but massive company only has 18months of cash isn’t a new development. The new development is that the 18 months of cash is an order or two of magnitude more than prior companies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662986