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OpenAI could reportedly run out of cash by mid-2027
- iamspoilt 9mo agoQuestion: Why aren't we seeing similar reports for Anthropic?
- __loam 9mo agoLower profile and they're not making as many crazy deals but they're also losing incredible amounts of money.
- DoctorOW 9mo agoI read somewhere (404 media? ) that they spent more on AWS than they got in revenue for 2025.
- nuclearpidgeon 9mo agoAfter getting $8bn in investment from Amazon... (as of nov 2024)
- thenaturalist 9mo agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1qf6z4v/anthropic_350b_valuation_26b_revenue_healthcare/ https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1qf6z4v/anthropic_3...
- piskov 9mo agoAmazon can buy them when it is time
- barishnamazov 9mo agoI'm gonna silently hope that this means we'll suddenly have extremely cheap GPU and RAM selling out in 2027. Hardware prices have gotten out of hand.
- captain_coffee 9mo agoI don't know why I am expecting that to happen earlier with the rate they are burning throgh the dollars by the billions...
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo agoWhat a useless article. OpenAI will obviously do many things before "running out of cash" - 1/ Implement more aggressive advertising 2/ Stop training new models 3/ Raise more funding
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo ago4) Sell all of those RAM chips they bought
- viraptor 9mo agoThey can't... not in an affordable way anyway. Those are integrated into other hardware they have. They don't buy the ram sticks others can use.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoThe RAM doesn't exist. What they bought were RAM futures.
- trollbridge 9mo agoYou can sell this, although the value would plummet if they did.
- zb3 9mo agoVery good outcome.
- dcre 9mo agoAnd it’s just a restatement of the original, which isn’t any good either. Really mediocre.
- Esophagus4 9mo agoThat wasn't the conclusion of the article (I'm assuming you're reacting to the headline and haven't read the article). 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 https://www.eesel.ai/blog/inflection-ai
- Esophagus4 9mo agoPrimary source: https://archive.is/Pf1M6 https://archive.is/Pf1M6
- somewhereoutth 9mo ago> Investors were briefly spooked last July when an M.I.T. study suggested that almost none of this is useful to businesses. Corporations had poured tens of billions of dollars into A.I., yet only one in 20 projects had succeeded, the study reported. But a Wharton study in October delivered the opposite verdict. After interviewing 801 leaders at U.S. companies, Wharton concluded that three-quarters of the businesses were getting a positive return on their A.I. investments. MIT actually carried out a study. Wharton just asked some execs, who of course parroted the party line. Winter is coming.
- wmf 9mo agoOriginal link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/opinion/openai-ai-bubble-financing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/opinion/openai-ai-bubble-... This is pretty normal for a fast-growing startup, although OpenAI may be the largest to ever do it.
- dvt 9mo agoThe AI doom and gloom is so weird, and it's just turning into a bizarre echo chamber. AI is orders of magnitude more useful and transformative than Facebook was in 2005, and Meta is now one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Even if OpenAI has a down round or defaults on some loans, the technology has already proven to have dozens upon dozens of practical applications.
- ben_w 9mo ago"Useful and transformative" doesn't mean "financially successful". 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.
- versteegen 9mo agoPaid/API LLM inference is profitable, though. For example, DeepSeek R1 had "a cost profit margin of 545%" [1] (ignoring free users and using a placeholder $2/hour figure H800 GPU, which seems ballpark of real to me due to Chinese electricity subsidies). Dario has said each Anthropic model is profitable over its lifetime. (And looking at ccusage stats and thinking Anthropic is losing thousands per Claude Code user is nonsense, API prices aren't their real costs. That's why opencode gives free access to GLM 4.7 and other models: it was far cheaper than they expected due to the excellent cache hit rates.) If anyone ran out of money they would stop spending on experiments/research and training runs and be profitable... until their models were obsolete. But it's impossible for everyone to go bankrupt. [1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/202502OpenSourceWeek/day_6_one_more_thing_deepseekV3R1_inference_system_overview.md https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...
- ossa-ma 9mo agoWhere is the actual financial modelling? This is pure speculation? I understand being bearish and frightened of AI but this accounts for absolutely NOTHING, and especially doesn't include any projections on potential ad revenue which is likely going to be huge given their DAU and what you can extrapolate their ARPU to be based on other big tech advertisers.
- trollbridge 9mo agoAs the article pointed out, there is no moat. There’s no reason to think they’ll be more successful with ads than MySpace was versus Facebook.
- mirekrusin 9mo agoYou'll probably be able to vibe code filtering it out anyway.
- elorant 9mo agoHow do we know that ad revenue will be huge? 80% of the questions that I ask can't be monetized because they're not about purchase intent. And even if they could, has OpenAI built an auction system to bid on keywords? How exactly will all this work and be streamlined in the next 18 months to the point that it could generate the revenue they need to keep with the ridiculous investment requirements in infrastructure?
- sethops1 9mo agoThe thing i keep coming back to is that an LLM backed query is so, so much more expensive than a typical web request. What kind of advertising is going to align in the value necessary to cover those costs, plus margin? Chatbots aren't YouTube, users aren't going to sit through 30 second ads, I don't think.
- eek2121 9mo agoIt honestly doesn't matter. 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.)
- behnamoh 9mo agoNo, they can start selling overpriced RAMs; they might even sell it to Nvidia and buy back GPUs.
- trollbridge 9mo agoGiven that OpenAI’s strongest skill seems to be fundraising, I could see them transforming into a financial institution.
- truetraveller 9mo agoOpenFI. Still got that jing.
- herewulf 9mo agoOpenFLI. You read it here first.
- trollbridge 9mo agoOpenFTX. Are you in?
- behnamoh 9mo agoOpenClosed, that'll show'em
- popcorncowboy 9mo agoThe billions and billions of dollars standing in a lonnnnng queue begging to get in the door at OpenAI suggests Bruno is a little over his skis.
- dudeinjapan 9mo agoWhen reached for comment, Altman responded “Hold my beer”
- flenserboy 9mo agoCrash the PC market, & then disappear down the drain. Fascinating business plan.
- roxolotl 9mo agoThis doesn’t feel like news to me? A tech startup that has 18 months of runway is pretty good honestly. The story is the quantity of cash involved in that runway. Edit: Startup might be the wrong term but Uber raised money every 18months at least for 10 years till it was finally profitable in 2023. My point is more that saying an unprofitable but massive company only has 18months of cash isn’t a new development. The new development is that the 18 months of cash is an order or two of magnitude more than prior companies.
- sgjohnson 9mo agoI don’t think OpenAI could be considered a startup anymore.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoDoes the term "startup" appear in any dictionaries before 1993 Post-1993, a Wikipedia search for "tech startup" redirects to the page for "startup company". Interestingly, it contains a reference to YC The definition of "startup company" provided relies on a single reference to a 2013 Forbes article https://web.archive.org/web/20131217064510if_/http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-is-a-startup/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131217064510if_/http://www.for... What does "tech startup" actually mean. Is there a concise, unambiguous definition Putting aside the ambiguous term "tech", why not just use the term "company" The term "company" can be defined concisely as, e.g., "an association of persons for the purpose of carrying on some enterprise or business". Note there is no need to refer to an example company Is it possible to define "startup" without referring to an example startup
- nickthegreek 9mo agoI feel like they are signing many commitments way beyond that timeline.. some of them possible circular with the possibility to really dent the economy at scale. That’s the part that makes it news.
- csto12 9mo agoIs OpenAI really a “tech startup” at this point?
- SilverElfin 9mo agoAlso Musk is trying to sue them for over $100 billion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662986
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Invictus0 9mo agoThey haven't turned on the ads yet
- butz 9mo agoIs there anything we can do to help them reach this goal sooner?
- uhfraid 9mo agoStrategies such as this would accelerate said endeavor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577464
- plutodev 9mo agoThis looks less like an AI failure and more like a compute economics problem. Frontier labs are chasing marginal model gains that require exponentially more GPUs, power, and capex, so burn rates explode even if demand grows. Centralized hyperscale data centers concentrate that risk on a few balance sheets. An alternative is treating AI as a distributed workload problem—using spot or decentralized GPU markets (io.net, Akash, etc.) to tap existing idle capacity instead of financing trillion-dollar builds. You trade enterprise SLAs for lower capex exposure, but structurally it changes the cost curve.