The author's prediction is that OpenAI will get bought.

I know it sounds kind of crazy, but there actually is precedent for that: Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup after he realized there was no possible way for an AI startup to compete with the Googles of the world with $100B in cash and giant free cash flow machines given how capital intensive it is to build AI.[1]

To me, it's not that outlandish to think that if OpenAI really does need to spend a ton of money to survive, they will probably have to either raise or get bought (or find that magic money tree by monetizing their business). Because right now, they don't have the cash flow to compete with Google.

Could obviously change, but I think that's where the author is coming from.

[1]https://www.eesel.ai/blog/inflection-ai

A single LLM provider might have been able to get great margins and capture a significant fraction of the total economic output of (currently e.g. junior grade software engineering), but collectively they're in an all-pay auction for the hardware to train models worth paying for, and at the same on questionable margins because they need to compete with each other on cost.

They can all go bankrupt, and leave behind only trained models that normal people won't be able to run for 5 years while consumer-grade stuff catches up. Or any single one of them might win, which may not be OpenAI. Any or all may get state subsidies (US, Chinese, European, whatever).

All kinds of outcomes are possible.

IMO LLMs will be equally transformative for online influence campaigns (aka ads + Cambridge analytica on steroids)

It better be, it's taken over 40000x the funding.

The question is not whether AI is useful, the question is whether it's useful enough relative to the capital expectations surrounding it. And those expectations are higher than anything the world has ever seen.

Sometimes these "articles" are sent out as thinly veiled "press releases" prior to an new round of investment. Sometimes someone who thinks they are a "reporter" has what they think is an "exclusive" or a "hot take". Regardless, as someone who has spent all of his career in startups...this is...business as usual. Another round of funding/financing will commence. Open AI will be fine unless investors lose confidence in AI. We won't know how it will play out until it plays out. Media outlets reporting on this are playing off the AI bubble hype for clicks. (Yes, we are in a bubble. No, nobody knows when it will pop, nor how bad it will be, ad driven company just wants more ad revenue, nothing to see here, move along.)

Ad revenue doesn't come out of thin air. Unless budgets and TAM in the ad space increase (hint: they won't), the spend has to mostly come from cannibalizing META and Google. In that regard, I wish them luck - that will be a long and bloody battle. And both the established players can fight it longer than OAI because they have actually revenue streams and strong cash balances.

Chatgpt is mostly worse than Gemeni too (arguably) and isn't nearly as rate limited. So they're already losing users and making their product a worse experiance than their competition.

Sure OpenAI will make some money from ads but will it be anything close to what it takes to quench the amount of money they're burning? It seems unlikely to me. They really need to be bought out by a sugar-momma who can afford to play this kind of game like MSFT.

Every doom and gloom article about OpenAI is almost always speculation, with no actual evidence backing the claims. The issue is that people love a good "AI is going to fail" story, so it gets shot up to the front page. Unfortunately, some journalists now know that it can rake in clicks, so they will happily reduce their journalistic integrity to ride the wave.