To some extend I think people are putting way to much weight on his exact words, and not why he says them. Altman is a man who is quickly running out of lies, so now he starts slinging random arguments that can't stand up to even the briefest of scrutiny. OpenAI is burning cash and fuel. There are results, and they are, to some extend, impressive, but not impressive enough to justify the cost and Altman are no longer…
Subscriptions are highly profitable for the typical chat user.
And API is overall net profitable.
What is extremely taxing to their finances is R&D, training and in particular development of frontier models.
My assessment is that when the music stops those who have the most subs will win.
Companies like Apple who had sat out the battle and built niche moats (privacy), and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic who have the market share will be fine.
In 6-12 months, nearly any lead they have will be eaten by distillation.
What will then happen is they will lose subscriptions to services which offer AI as a tack on like Gemini with Googles regular cloud subscriptions.
This will continue. Companies like Apple will have deep pockets to move on the businesses that go underwater and then can restart training in a much less congested market.
All this is assuming a relatively graceful collapse but that is what's likely given how aware everyone is that the bubble must pop.
Training costs will fall. Companies like Nvidia and other shovel businesses (i.e. selling GPUs and not using them) mostly have their revenue secured with funding from the present.
What I see as confirmations of this pattern is if we stop getting ground busting frontier models and then coast for 3-5 years when competition becomes more incremental.
This is an unpopular opinion, Will OpenAI go bust? No chance. Nor will Anthropic.