That OpenAI is in trouble is something we’ve been talking about from long agobut the last few weeks have aggravated the situation even more if possible. The company continues burning money like there’s no tomorrow and the income does not match. OpenAI needs investors and to justify those investments it needs to diversify into new markets. It’s going to be very difficult.
The problem. On the one hand we have an OpenAI that dominated the AI chatbot market with ChatGPT, but no longer enjoys the technological advantage it used to. Sam Altman himself acknowledged in an internal email that Google was technologically catching up with them with Gemini 3 and user figures indicate that Gemini is getting dangerously close, with 650,000 monthly users in front of the 800,000 weekly ChatGPT users. Losing the market leadership they themselves created would be a serious problem, but unfortunately for OpenAI, it is not the only one.
The other problem. OpenAI’s spending projections for the next eight years are $1.4 trillion, said by Sam Altman himself. Let’s pause: 1.4 European billion, that is, 1,400,000,000,000. Thirteen figures, that’s nothing.
To justify those astronomical investments, Altman talks about getting into robotics, cloud computing services and the highly anticipated (although nothing concrete) personal device designed by Jony Ive and which It will be “the iPhone of AI”. It sounds good, the problem is that at the moment OpenAI does not have the infrastructure and it does not say how it plans to compete in these markets.
The OpenAI business. The barrier to entry to create an AI chatbot in 2022, when ChatGPT came out, was much lower than that presented by the sectors with which OpenAI is flirting. In the Wall Street Journal newsletter They point out something key: they are markets with fierce competition and huge companies that have been well established for years. Let’s look at the panorama they face:
- Robotics: Humanoid robots are still a developing segment and we have doubts that it becomes mainstreambut already There are many companies competing to put a robotic butler in our home. That OpenAI would manufacture its own robots seems completely unlikely because they do not have the infrastructure and it would cost them a fortune, something they do not have. The most feasible scenario would be to work with a robotics company to integrate their AI. In the United States it would have to compete with Figure and Tesla, both with their own AI. In China, with Unitree and Deep Robotics. Complicated.
- Cloud computing: getting computing power is another of OpenAI’s problems and the center of its multi-million dollar deals with amazon, NVIDIA either amd to mention a few. Setting up your own business in the cloud would mean competing with giants like Microsoft, Google or Amazon, who are also your own partners and you need them. Not to mention that
- Personal devices: It is the sector in which they have a more concrete plan, and yet we hardly know anything about this supposed “iPhone of AI”, a device so revolutionary that the smartphone would be a thing of the past, or so Ive and Altman said. We have not seen a single image of the device and the project has been delayedbut assuming OpenAI ends up launching it, it has the difficult task of convincing the world that it is better than a smartphone. Humane didn’t make it.
For now it works for them. In October OpenAI closed a share sale that raised its valuation to $500 billionmaking it the most valuable startup in the world. It is an astronomical figure especially considering that the company’s expenses are also astronomical; only in the last quarter They lost a whopping 11.5 billion dollars. Investors have remained confident until now, the question is how long the party will continue. OpenAI needs it to last several years to be able to have that business that is going to cost 1.4 billion to build.
Images | Wikipedia
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