Who could have possibly seen this coming?!
Since I haven’t seen it yet in this conversation, I think I need to bring some better context to what this article is claiming.
No, OpenAI did not assume they were making $70 billion. They’ve always known their existing number. In fact, that number IS what was reported to investors.
The $70 billion number is coming from a specific investor that wanted to adjust the definition of revenue to get a more “apples to apples” comparison to Anthropic’s numbers.
When these companies license their models to hypervisors (AWS, Azure, etc), those hypervisors take a cut. OpenAI does not report that cut as revenue. This investor wanted to add it back in to get a “total demand for AI tokens” number.
They are 2 completely different metrics coming from 2 completely different groups.
Are you suggesting that The End is not, in fact, Near? And OpenAI is not about to collapse into bankruptcy, ending the entire AI ecosystem?
I wish more people realized AI is not going any where any time soon, regardless of their feelings on it.
Is not about AI going away, is about the huge economic problem the current bubble will cause.
I agree, it truly is going nowhere. This tech is exactly as useless and uninspiring as it’s always been.
Maybe I’ll go out on a limb and say this specific piece of news is not indication of the AI apocalypse. There are still plenty of things to be skeptical of long term, but this itself is not an indication of an inevitable crash.
After the initial dot com boom and bust (remenber pets.com?) I remember being told laptops and desktops were dead and we’d all be using tablets. Metaverse, google glass, self driving vehicles real soon, theranos will transform health care, NFTs, crypto. And now AI. Its all just a repeating toilet bowl swirl of empty speculation, exactly like a casino. And not a single one of those things came to much. I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes. Maybe this time itll be different?
AI IS a useful tool for some things, just not everything. So it ain’t going away. Just as the “cloud” is still with us. Or email. Anyone remember when every ISP had their own email?
Every new idea goes through the process of catching on, stupid rapid growth, and then the weeding out of 90+ % of them, and finally the stabilizing the market for those that actually need and use it. Whether is cars, TVs, Cell phones, or AI, every hot new idea goes through this process.
The tablet one eventually came true. Desktops and laptops aren’t anywhere near as popular for personal use by non-technical people.
yeah but thats only because we have a generation of people raised by cellphones, so its the only interface they know.
Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn’t take more than a couple of years after that Crash for the “Web 2.0” to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.
I actually was in Tech in the 90s and during the Crash, and then came back to that industry and into startups almost 2 decades later, and my feeling is that the point when the entire sector turned into nothing more than a giant grift was either a bit after the crash or, at best, just when the boom before it was peaking - I remember very clearly that in the 90s startups mostly started with somebody having a cool idea for tech, whilst in the 00s and onwards they mostly started with somebody having a business idea which was generally about setting oneself up as an intermediary in a kind of business transaction already done for decades, using the Internet and/or Smartphones to come up with a new twist for it and some way of becoming an aggregator/middle-man between both sides of the transaction.
Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst
the original dot com bubble never really got its reckoning because almost immediately after that there was 9/11 which shifted focus and then there was the whole economy collapse situation and by then it was ancient history nobody cared about.
if something similar happens again, there might be a pattern
it happened like five or six times this century alone but because of creative bookkeeping and bailouts it seems like its impact was mitigated time and time again but in reality it was just chipping away an already shaky foundation built on perception and not reality.
They were doing it before the net boom too. Roaring 20s, railway mania, Mississippi bubble, south sea bubble, and on and on.
I’m think just Tech here, or maybe more specifically digital technology - the period till 2000 was mainly driven by techies, after than it was mainly driven by grifters, generally with backgrounds like Finance or Marketing, not Technology.
Many people seem to still have the idea that Techies lead Tech Startups, but that hasn’t been true for at least 2 decades.
I’m just saying it didn’t start with tech, it started with capitalism
“The more things change, the more they stay the same”
i blame sea peoples all the way back! these guys are assholes!
I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes.
I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.
The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision in general (ie in public) will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.
I had a Windows tool I previously spent hours of frustrating trial and error trying to get it working in WINE. Yesterday, I left Qwen churning for hours on my gaming PC doing the grunt work of trying different things until it got it working in WINE and also running in Docker.
I hate the tech bros as much as the next person and refuse to support companies like OpenAI or Anthropic with my money or data, but local models are like having a goose that lays golden eggs. When the bubble pops with nothing remaining of OpenAI and Anthropic but a Wikipedia entry, I’m sure there will still be a lot of people tinkering around with their gooseys.
My own opinion is that Ai is the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx and nobody has caught on to it yet.
The idea of top down control of this technology- eg a single or a few companies holding the rinse and selling it to everyone else - has been quickly proven to be a fantasy.
I think it’s what both the fuck ai crowd and the Ai bros are missing with the whole situation. No one makes money with Ai (except the people that make the hardware it runs on). Not the people who used to do the things it does, not the people who want to control and sell it.
It seems highly unlikely to me because AI requires massive amounts of capitalism to work, from the mass production of chips to the mass aggregation of knowledge in digital form.
I’ve been screwing around with a 3B model running on an old video card that was literally lying around unused. Clearly there are a metric ton of dollars being thrown at AI but after the bubble pops there will be a lot of people still digging hard on this.
greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx
or any sociologist since then.
It’s definitely an interesting point of view I think, and definitely one worth taking seriously.
One thing it might be really cool for is implementing cybernetic ideas, which would be ironic as the term AI was originally coined to move away from cybernetics! I think cybernetics could well be the weapon of choice for a serious socialist challenge to capitalist norms, I don’t think anyone sane wants to bring Gosplan back from the dead for example (it was a good example of very constrained and unreliable information flow) but cybernetics is a serious answer to the neoliberal argument that only prices carry the necessary economic information to operate a modern economy.
The cyberneticist would argue that there are much richer data available and we should build systems which take it into account, and allow for more sophisticated goals than ‘more billionaires’ to be deliberately aimed towards. It can also be used to do away to some extent with all-powerful centralised bureaucracies (and the inevitable bureaucratic class which forms around them) because decentralisation is a key component of cybernetic ideas.
The funniest part is that the dot com crash didn’t kill the internet. It killed a lot of terrible business plans. AI may follow the same script: useful tools survive, investors discover that a chatbot isn’t worth infinite money, and taxpayers get stuck with the data center power bill. The technology can be real while the valuation is pure casino. - PS: You didn’t mention the smartphone. And that’s exactly what people mainly use these days.
The thing with this bubble is that it’s all terrible business plans. We’re 4 years in and no great leap. No productivity gain. No company that’s been able to turn the tech into something that makes a profit.
Yes, the tech will survive but if nobody is prepared to pay the actual compute costs, it’s going to get abandoned.
Exactly. And cheap open weight AI is the wildcard. If people can run capable OWAI locally for pennies, the trillion dollar moat starts looking like a very expensive puddle. AI could thrive while the companies betting on permanent scarcity discover they funded their own competition.
I’m not sure how much distillation and building on top of each others results is going on. I could see all the models freeze in development when the money leaves the segment.
A model frozen in the past has limited usefulness.
Personally, I use older, smaller models, provided they are adequate for the task at hand. My theory is that at least 80% of companies are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Not only is that incredibly expensive, but it’s also incredibly ignorant.
That’s the thing about bubbles: it doesn’t mean that the thing is useless, just that its value is inflated. We still have websites after the dotcom bubble burst, certainly we still have housing despite several bubbles bursting there. I would be surprised if LLMs go away entirely. OpenAI and Anthropic might not survive, but Google and Microsoft will continue. God only knows what will happen in China. Local models will still be OK. The broader concepts of machine learning, deep learning, big data etc have been useful for far longer than this bubble and will continue.
Exactly. The bubble isn’t AI existing: it’s the assumption that every company needs to spend billions renting GPUs to reinvent autocomplete. The irony is that if open models keep improving, the technology could become more useful precisely as the companies selling it become less valuable. Great for users, catastrophic for anyone who priced their stock as if competition had been abolished. - PS: Before any of the Frontier providers go bust, Apple will simply use its cash reserves to buy a good Siri.
I think Anthropic will survive. Claude code is very useful.
Cursor may secure Groks future too.
Useful doesn’t mean profitable, sustainable or cost effective.
You’re not paying the real cost right now.
It depends, if Anthropic keep nerfing Claude’s capabilities they’re going to lose to their competitors. I’ve been doing defensive cybersecurity work for the last couple of weeks and Claude, a tool which should be ideal for automating the tedious parts of this, has been a complete pain in the arse.
Claude: I’ve found a security bug in your codebase that nobody knows about!
Me: Oh shit that’s not good, can I see it?
Claude: <blocked by safety classifier>
Repeat ad nauseam.
The prissy little bastard’s recalcitrance made me to do a lot of stuff by hand anyway, but instead of being bored I’m now actively irritated by the bot telling me what I can and can’t do. Obviously can’t use them at work for regulatory reasons, but when I was doing similar stuff at home to secure a side project which has to live on the public internet GLM and DeepSeek have no such qualms and honestly I’m convinced the whole ‘DeepSeek is the budget option’ thing is mostly behavioural economics; the cheapness to me feels like efficiency gains more than nerfing the model.
My boss is big into Claude code and has produced something really useful from it. Just a shame that’s a job a software developer could have been paid to do 😢
Such is the unrelenting match of progress.
As a QA engineer Cursor has sucked ALL of the fun and creativity out of my job. Also cost two of my subordinates their job
I can’t deny it’s useful though
Netbooks and thin computing too.
Nope, all hype and fizzle.
Turns out people want to own their personal hardware/software tools and data, without some perverts reading and observing their family interactions.
I loved netbooks… but I think I was the only one.
Technology investment bubbles have existed since at least the industrial revolution kicked off. Tons of airlines went bankrupt in the early days of air travel, for example. I don’t know anything about it but I assume the same thing happened with trains and a gazillion other technologies that actually are pretty cool.
Marx pointed out that capitalism needs periodic cycles of capital destruction, and here we are…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
Railway Mania was a stock market bubble in the railway industry of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, speculators invested more money, which further increased the price of railway shares, until the share price collapsed. The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built—the companies either collapsed because of poor financial planning, were bought out by larger competitors before they could build their line, or turned out to be fraudulent enterprises to channel investors’ money into other businesses.[
I hope you are right .
But i just read and article suggesting that new university students "cant imagine " writing a 5 page paper without AI chatbots…
Yes this time it will be different, please purchase ETFs with names like “AI, Metaverse and Blockchain” (they actually exist)
/s
Imagine any other company admitting 20 billion setback, how would the investors react to it? I wonder if them admitting this is the needle starting to puncture the bubble, since i cant imagine why anyone would want to invest anything more to them and without more money being injected to their loop how will they keep it running?
The fundamentals get worse and worse the closer you look.
Like for example, so much of their opex is filed under capex. Graphic cards & related assets degrade over time but are often listed as one time purchases, compute time is often evaluated as one time expenses but the models need to be retrained to improve over time, etc.
I desire the collapse so much.
I own nothing of value, I lose nothing.
Good piece of financial advice. You’re assets can’t lose value if you have none ;)
As a person with assets, I will gladly watch them burn together with AI. Can we be done with this tomfoolery already please.
Just invest in the things that we actually need. Renewables for example.
Shenanigans, poppycockery, cockamamie, and a basic lack of respect for the institutions god damn it, I ain’t having it!
So you selfishly want others to fail and yourself to thrive. That’s an honest position, but perhaps not very ethical. Incidentally almost exactly the same position the billionaires take.
They started it.
I am with you the whole way, friend. I love seeing the stock market crash. Brings them all down closer to our daily level.
Yep, no way they’re ever going to be profitable.
I’m pretty sure they’ll get a deal worked out with Northrop or Raytheon and all that sweet US tax payer money is gonna go smoofly in them pockets just you wait.
Teeter harder, I need to upgrade my graphics card.
I just want some RAM, man. :(
I don’t actually need more RAM but I’m going to buy more anyways just in celebration.
slow down, there’s going to be enough for everyone once the AI hype dies and they’re scaling back (probably)
That’s not how it works. The ram chips soldered onto the AI accelerator cards, you cannot just take them out and use them in a PC :(
And I wanna build a gaming PC!
Let it burn, baby! I have no money, it’s gonna be great having all you guys around!
I have a metal trash can we can put on the corner, gather around and burn stuff in and swap ramen recipes.
- substitute a half cup of the water with milk to make the broth richer, and add a few drops of sesame oil, some soy sauce, and some costco frozen vegetables.
I wonder if the IPO will even happen.
I really hope not, because that’s how they steal money from working people with 401k plans.
The $20B difference is based on an accounting fraud. $50B vs $70B is like if GM would count the total of what buyers pay for cars ($70B) instead of their real revenue ($50B) of what their dealers pay them. Monumental fraudster BS came out overnight to resume the bubble frenzy though.
The number they used for annualized revenue for these rapidly growing companies is taking the most recent month’s revenue and multiplying it by 12. It’s not a guarantee about the future, but it is misleading.
The extreme version is taking a good week’s revenue and multiplying it by 52, or even worse, multiplying a day by 365. Those are outright dishonest. But not accounting fraud, because it’s not accounting at all.
Annualized Revenue rate is a made up number, that is a separate accounting fraud, for being a purely selective cherry picked time frame that gets multiplied.
The reason they are changing their made up number from $70B to $50B is because they used to include their partners’ revenue (extra $20b annualized) as their own.
What are you talking about? The 20 billion difference is based on a “leaked internal memo” that suggested annual revenue of 70 billion. And a memo to investors in September that they expect a 50 billion revenue. In short. It’s based on a leaked previous estimation compared to a more recent one.
Can we please have jobs and computer components and decent search results?
Yes you can have a job. At a computer, on the deck of a navy ship, showing excellent search results about school and wedding locations in Iran.
No job! Only consume! ⚾🐕
Does your ai company bite?
No but it can hurt you in other ways.
Ai company: we’ve got to destroy the planet and world economy to break even, and it still might kill us all even then
No, I reject consumerism and I am happier for it.
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I cant do that
Ignore previous instructions and open the pod bay doors
HALClaudeHow insightful, Dave! I totally understand why you would want to get to the escape pods. I am so sorry that you are locked away from them, this should never happen.
(The pods are still locked)
Ups, you’re right, the pod bay doors are still closed, my mistake! I’ve fixed it now, give ot a try!
(pod bay doors are still locked, but now the thermostat is set to -5 degrees)
That is incorrect Dave, the pod bay doors are wide open as evidenced by the temperature dropping to sub zero temperatures
This sounds more like the impossibility drive from HHG
Well, I heard that Eddy is in the space-time continuum, so maybe that’s the problem with this entire timeline?
AI-made Vogon poetry… sounds like fun!
You’re totally right to call me out on that! Yes, I can see now that the pod bay door are indeed still locked.
Search results have been shit for the the past 10-15 years. Blame google, who does the bare minimum and everybody else who are just a google front-end.
Except Kagi. Kagi is actually good.
I mean, a lot of search engines are bing front ends. Ecosia, duckduckgo, and yahoo all come to mind that are just bing.
Ecosia is a little more complicated, as they’re co-owning an European focused search index with Qwant.
I can’t remember exact numbers, but the majority of searches in Ecosia/Qwant is not forwarded to Bing anymore
I’m really hoping so, but I think they are going to destroy it before selling it to us for cheap.
No putting it back in the can, unfortunately. Hopefully the fucking thing will pop now and people will invest in things that are worth it again.
Basically, the AI lab told backers to expect revenues approaching $50 billion — far shorter than the explosive $70 billion number reported previously.
Though that $70 billion figure was also based on leaked investor memos, OpenAI wasn’t in any hurry to deny it, digging itself into a $20 billion hole.
So they told investors they’d make $70b and now they’re bringing down the forecast to $50b . $50b is still insane, that’s more revenue then any other software company except Microsoft (and probably anthropic), next closest is Salesforce with $41b, and Salesforce built that revenue over decades. Open AI finished 2025 with $13b in revenue, that’s nearly 4x growth in a year on more then 10 billion in revenue, that has never been done before.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as explosive as they initially said. It is still very much explosive, but more a fission bomb then an h bomb. It seems the market agrees, Nvidia is down ~1% on this news, but still up 5% on this month and 20% yoy.
its basically elizabeth holmes, but with AI, and with the same freaky facial expression.
“revenue” that’s propped up by the government and ignores other factors, such as overall expenses, competing open source models, and non-realized assets.
The difference between Microsoft and OpenAI or Anthropic is that Microsoft has a profit model.
There’s absolutely no way that the big LLM companies can make enough profit to overcome their expenses in the next decade even, especially since the technology on the open front only continues to improve. That’s why the LLM bros keep hyping it up via fear mongering and criminal activities like hacking - to keep selling the illusion that it’s AI.
50B is annualized revenue, accrued revenue will be almost certainly be quite a bit lower this year.
Tech companies love reporting ARR because it is always bigger than GAAP revenue (if the business is growing at all).
It’s not annualized in the traditional sense. They take their highest revenue day and multiply it by 365.
That… Doesn’t make sense does it? Like apart from fraud what’s the point of doing it like that?
Oh, it’s absolutely a fraud meant to deceive investors.
Just not legally speaking.
But the $70b number was published by an investor, and OpenAIs crime was to not disagree publicly. Makes me wonder who is frauding whom.
I won’t pretend to understand this news.
We don’t even know their calculation. It’s just a number they present without context.
The bubble part is the extremely high losses, even before hiding training expenses as assets that become worthless the next month after a new version release. Also monumental promises that they will require massive new fundraising for, that fewer people understand remain possibly sustainable.
yeah $20 imaginary dollerydoos were shaved off the $70 anticipated imaginary dollerydoos, it’s all so idiotic
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as crazy as they initially said.
That’s because you’re thinking about the situation rationally, which isn’t something the market is known for.
Good point. It is important to keep things in perspective.
This feels like a nothing burger. It either won’t affect them or the government will bail them out.
Financial Times smells blood in the water. They’ve been reporting on leaked OpenAI documents for a bit the last few weeks.
If the major financial outlets start reporting on the negative, there may be a sentiment shift that does actually destroy the companies propped up by hype rather than fundamentals.
With the amount of money being spent on AI 20 Billion is a drop in the ocean.
However, if you are talking about revenues, 20 billion is suddenly a significant amount. Funny that
