Why is this flagged? It’s a legitimate conversation important to our industry.
Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#22If the government were to bail out, OpenAI wouldn’t that open up litigation from competitors like Google or anthropic?
> If the government were to bail out, OpenAI wouldn’t that open up litigation from competitors like Google or anthropic? No. Government has done lots of bailouts, and it is has never opened up litigation from conpetitors, even though a common result is that the government (1) stops their competitor from failing, and (2) becomes a major and active shareholder in their competitor. The reason it doesn't open up litigati…
The real real reason is probably they don’t want to anger Orange Jesus.
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#23[deleted]
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#24If the government were to bail out, OpenAI wouldn’t that open up litigation from competitors like Google or anthropic?
It will be probably be painted as a strategic move of "we need to do this in order to remain in front of the Chinese!", so Google trying to litigate all this will, first, put it in the same boat as China's supporters, a very bad position to be right now if you're a big company in the US, and second, put the US Government's sight on its (Alphabet's) own business, that's also a very bad place to be if you're a near-monopoly as Alphabet now is.
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#25This is flagged? Why?
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#26"In the past few months alone, OpenAI has racked up commitments of nearly $1.5 trillion, including: $250 billion with Microsoft - using Azure cloud platform capacity $500 billion with Oracle - for cloud computing capacity… : " I assume these companies will eat the loss and write it off for tax purposes.
I doubt there’s an asset to write off yet.
Assuming normal accounting applies, OpenAI doesn’t owe them the money until they use the compute power. Then it becomes income, and accounts receivable goes up until they pay for it.
The stock market can anticipate income that hasn’t arrived yet, but that just affects the stock price.
(ChatGPT tells me that accounting rules are different for leases of an identifiable physical asset, though.)
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the government were to bail out, OpenAI wouldn’t that open up litigation from competitors like Google or anthropic? No. Government has done lots of bailouts, and it is has never opened up litigation from conpetitors, even though a common result is that the government (1) stops their competitor from failing, and (2) becomes a major and active shareholder in their competitor. The reason it doesn't open up litigati…
The real real reason is probably they don’t want to anger Orange Jesus.
Trump wasn’t President for any of the past major bailouts, so, no, I don’t think that was the reason there wasn’t major liability of the government to competitors of bailed out firms.
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#28"In the past few months alone, OpenAI has racked up commitments of nearly $1.5 trillion, including: $250 billion with Microsoft - using Azure cloud platform capacity $500 billion with Oracle - for cloud computing capacity… : " I assume these companies will eat the loss and write it off for tax purposes.
These “commitments” aren’t generally contractual obligations beyond some clawback or penalty for not fulfilling them. Don’t forget Microsoft and oracle retain the infrastructure built. It’s generally reserved capacity with minimum spend and a maximum spend as the quoted $1.5T. The spend also typically ramps and there are triggers and out clauses built in. These aren’t bonds or debt or what they imply as “coming due” in the article.
People keep drawing parallels to the housing crisis and ensuing financial crisis. Those were hundreds of millions of individual contracts spread across thousands of banks and debt holders. There was little understanding at any individual institution of the correlation risks with subprime or the systemic counterparty risk (I know I sat in the center of core risk at one of the big systemic banks at the time). In this the institutions are all large, know their counterparts well, know OpenAI, etc. Despite all outward appearances none of them are signing up for insolvency, and none expect a bailout, and none WANT a bailout. It’s not good for any CFO’s career to be the one forced to give up the companies ownership to the US government and they at minimum will avoid this at all costs.
I’m not saying this isn’t all a giant bubble, but it’s more akin to the dot com bubble which was more of a shakeout than long term consolidation. It’s hard to say the www isn’t an intensively valuable set of infrastructure and services even if pets.com went out of business (and its business model has turned out to be pretty viable since).
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#29The Trump administration (in the person of David Sacks) has already said they would not bail out OpenAI in response to the comments of the OpenAI CFO.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailo...
Re: Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
#30This should not be flagged. The word "desperate" in the title is opinion, but everything in the article has been confirmed by multiple news outlets.