OPENAI IS FALLING APART IN REAL TIME I've watched companies implode for decades. This one has all the warning signs. OpenAI declared "Code Red" in December. Altman sent an internal memo telling employees to drop everything because Google's Gemini 3 is eating their lunch. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff publicly... ditched ChatGPT for Gemini after using it for two hours. ChatGPT traffic fell in November. Second month-over-month decline of 2025. Meanwhile Gemini jumped to 650 million monthly active users. The company that was supposed to build AGI can't keep its chatbot competitive. But the real story is the money... OpenAI lost $12 BILLION in a single quarter according to Microsoft's own fiscal disclosures. Deutsche Bank estimates $143 billion in cumulative negative cash flow before the company turns profitable. Their analysts put it bluntly: "No startup in history has operated with losses on anything approaching this scale." They're burning $15 million per day on Sora alone. $5 billion annually to generate copyright-infringing memes. Even Sora's lead engineer admitted the "economics are currently completely unsustainable." Here's the big math problem nobody wants to discuss: It's going to cost 5x the energy and money to make these models 2x better. The low-hanging fruit is gone. Every incremental improvement now requires exponentially more compute, more data centers, more power. Reports suggest OpenAI's large training runs in 2025 failed to produce models better than prior versions. GPT-5 launched to widespread disappointment. Users called it "underwhelming" and "horrible." OpenAI had to restore GPT-4o within 24 hours because users preferred the old model. Altman had promised GPT-5 would make GPT-4 feel "mildly embarrassing." Instead, users complained it was worse at basic math and geography. They've released GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2 since. Same complaints each time: too corporate, too safe, robotic, boring. The talent exodus makes this even worse: CTO Mira Murati. Gone. Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew. Gone. Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Gone. President Greg Brockman. Gone. Half the AI safety team departed. Multiple executives reportedly cited "psychological abuse" under Altman's leadership. And now Elon Musk is suing for up to $134 billion. A federal judge just ruled the case goes to jury trial in April. There's "plenty of evidence" that OpenAI's leaders promised to maintain the nonprofit structure that Musk funded. Musk provided $38 million in early funding based on those assurances. Now he wants his share of the $500 billion valuation. OpenAI called it "harassment." But the judge disagreed. Here's what I think happens next: The AI hype cycle is peaking. The diminishing returns are becoming impossible to hide. Competitors are catching up. The lawsuits are piling up. OpenAI needs to generate $200 billion in annual revenue by 2030 to justify their projections. That's 15x growth in five years while costs keep exploding. Even Sam Altman admitted investors are "overexcited" about AI. His exact words: "Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money." If I were running an AI startup with good traction right now, I'd be looking for an exit. Sell into the hype before the music stops. My positioning: I'm not touching OpenAI-adjacent plays at these valuations. The risk profile is astronomical. If you're exposed to the Magnificent 7 through AI infrastructure bets, consider trimming. The gap between promised revolution and delivered reality has never been wider. The smart money is rotating into sectors where valuations actually reflect fundamentals. Small and mid-caps are trading near decade lows relative to Big Tech while earnings growth is only marginally lower. Markets can price risk. But they can't price chaos. And OpenAI is chaos dressed up in a $500 billion valuation.show more

These platforms aren't even "AI". They are pattern seeking algorithms matching inputs to outputs at increasingly expensive and unrealistic scale. Companies are using AI as cover to fire and not hire for otherwise very traditional reasons, which is insidious.

Greg Brockman is still at OpenAI — what are you talking about?

My ChatGPT AI cant produce the same quality spreadsheets and pdf's it could a month ago for some reason...even when I show it what it did successfully. Grok doesn't do documents. Claude can do them with an agent that I have to open a browser to give it access to my online tools. Super slow and it has visual problems. It is a mess.

Sign up for my substack as I will be posting higher value added content there. Focus is on actionable ideas, both long and short. No endless talk about the Fed and the economy. Making money will be the objective. Join below:

Tl/Dr Open AI is COOKed 🔥

This reads less like collapse and more like the growing pains of a company trying to scale a general-purpose frontier model under extreme cost, competition, and scrutiny - messy, yes, but far from uniquely doomed.

There also appears to be an AI backlash / lack of interested brewing.

real ones been saying this for a while now

Yeah…

A company built on a lie will eventually become a lie

The way Sam moves is similar to how gang leaders move. Just saying. If that sounds odd to u, you should probably do some research to validate that yourself. He just does it in a passive aggressive way vs direct. “I’ll find a buyer for your shares” is textbook loyalty test. Gross

Meanwhile there’s us.

Are you shorting OpenAI then? Put your money where your mouth is :)

Almost every statement false or confused. Marc Benioff made a rash, wrong decisions after 2 hours, hence OpenAI is doomed. Oh no, Mira left. Who is going to make all those incredible RL breakthroughs?!

Not reading all that AI slop

Man uses AI to write anti-AI tweet. More news at 9.

This, but the exact opposite

"you're asking a lot of questions. you know, there are plenty of other people clamoring for access."

Brockman did not leave OpenAI… tf is this

Dont count out sama. I wouldnt bet against him

Sam Altman has no business being in this business.

The frustration of those at #Keep4o, #save4o, Gemini and others who moved on in tears, mocked as “dependent” by Sam Altman and the @OpenAI crew – the very reason for the anger of those who simply wish to do their jobs properly is laid bare here. Thank you.

Interesting thread, but this reads more like a short-seller pitch deck than balanced analysis. A few things: OpenAI's "Code Red" was internal motivation, not panic. Talent departures happen at every scaling company. And the $143B burn estimate assumes current cost structures, ignoring that inference costs are dropping ~10x per year. The Musk lawsuit is mostly noise—he gave away equity voluntarily and has his own competing AI company now. Not exactly a sympathetic plaintiff. The real question isn't whether OpenAI burns cash—all frontier AI companies do. It's whether they're building something defensible. That's still an open question.

Gemini win,100%

asks a serious question and everyone starts giggling like school girls, Sam Altman is toxic

MoneyLaundering/Fraud is the SiliconValley Business Model. They have been doing it for decades. Rinse and repeat.

What’s happening to OpenAI is what happens to any company that builds its entire business on a single assumption — that scaling will keep delivering outsized returns. Once scaling slows, or even just becomes more expensive, everything that was hidden by rapid growth becomes visible at once: the economics break, the product roadmap stalls, the cost curve explodes, and the organizational pressure spikes. None of this is unique to one company; it’s a paradigm problem. Every AI lab that is all-in on scaling is running into the same wall. And unless the underlying paradigm changes, the trajectory doesn’t improve — the failures just get bigger and more expensive.

Brockman is still there unless this is breaking news!?

Trump forcing Fed to 1% rates will probably keep OpenAI safe

The fundamental reason that the LLM form of AI will never work properly, and why it will never approach human intelligence, is because its architects have built it badly and on the cheap. They have sought to extract correlations out of low quality ‘Big Data’ found on the web and passed it through a neural network. The further danger is that the big tech companies, desperate to hold on to their monopoly positions, have invested heavily in training and using Large Language Models (LLMs), not because they work, but because it gives people less reason to try LLMs on other sites.

Kind of a red flag to use the "GPT-5 was a disappointment" line. Since the release it has been accepted as one of the best models available. 5.2 especially is quite good. But that doesn't make headlines I suppose. There's a difference between using a model in chat, and using it via API. The API cases take a bit longer to fully assess how good a new model is, but that's also where a model makes or breaks the economics. Most paid usage is going to come through on the API for application use.

The problem is the money. Right now it does not add up. I think Sam’s biggest problem was his assumption that OpenAI, would always have an indisputable lead in AI. He never planned for real competition. He may not have even planned on some of the technical difficulties with continuing to scale up AI. Sam Altman really does not have experience running a large company at this scale. You can always tell a lot about a business by how it handles the money. Right now open AI is failing that test. The fact that in this interview, when a question is given to him about finances, Sam just basically shuts it down with a passive aggressive move, tells all that you need to know. A giant red flag if you can’t even ask the CEO of a company about its finances.

genuinely makes no sense to me why they would even have Sora still up for the public use if it's burning through so much capital they should take a page out of Anthropic's book and look at the relentless focus that goes on behind the scenes, as opposed to trying to dominate all fronts (and fail)

As I’ve been saying for many months, the business model for AI isn’t there. Of course it will collapse. And AGI will NEVER happen. Fools can believe what they will.