OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

Post by 578_Observer » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

ifwinterco wrote: post #657

578_Observer wrote: post #434

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I am honored to receive a question from a fellow "Craftsman" (I assume from your name). To be honest, in 1989, I was just a child. I didn't drink the champagne. But as a banker today, I am the one cleaning up the broken glass. So I can tell you about 1989 from the perspective of a "Survivor's Loan Officer." I see two realities every day. One is the "Zombie" companies. Many SMEs here still list Golf Club Memberships o…

Beautiful writing, poetic. I've always had a morbid fascination with financial bubbles and the Japanese one of the late 1980s might be the most epic in history (definitely in modern times at least).

Post by lenkite » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #602

lenkite wrote: post #455

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> OpenAI's losses might actually be attractive to certain investors from a tax perspective. OpenAI is anyways seeking Govt Bailout for "National Security" reasons. Wow, I earlier scoffed at "Privatize Profits, Socialize Losses", but this appears to now be Standard Operating Procedure in the U.S. https://www.citizen.org/news/openais-request-for-massive-gov... So the U.S. Taxpayer will effectively pay for it. And not j…

> Make billionaires richer, make the middle class poor. Make the poor destitute. Make the destitute dead. (All USAID cuts) How do you square this thought with the actual rate of poverty being on a steady downward trend while billionaires do their things?

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

conartist6 wrote: post #576

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #387

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Is that constraint fundamental to what they are? Or are they just reflecting the behavior of markets when there's low hanging fruit around? When you look at models that were built for a specific purpose, closely intertwined with experts who care about that purpose, they absolutely propel communities to new heights. Consider the impact of alphafold, it won a Nobel prize, proteomics is forever changed. The issue is tha…

Experts making a specialized model isn't an example of an AI contributing value to society. All the value a model can offer comes from one of exactly two places: the person building the model, or the people the model trained on. We know that the model training on the model training on the model leads to model collapse...

Post by the_overseer » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 6:01 PM UTC

kkukshtel wrote: post #639

avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

I like to tell people that all the AI stuff happening right now is capitalism actually working as intended for once. People competing on features and price where we arent yet in a monopoly/duopoly situation yet. Will it eventually go rotten? Probably — but it's nice that right now for the first time in a while it feels like companies are actually competing for my dollar.

Post by smeeagain2 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #666

smeeagain2 wrote: post #599

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It’s easy to predict that, but when has “the whole thing” ever crashed? Sure, markets can crash, but this idea of “go to zero” never happens. That’s the whole calculus of these investments. Many of them are expected to fail. The fact that it’s painful to the average person means nothing to the people who run the system.