4 ms·

What Happens If OpenAI Dies?

103 points by thelastgallon 2mo ago

edgyquant 2mo ago
I doubt they would go public if anthropic does and it’s a slaughter. Allowing anthropic to go first might be in their best interest.
sebastianconcpt 2mo ago
Edit the config of the AI startups you have properly designed to be platform agnostic and make it use the other platforms models, wait the CI green and deploy prod
PLenz 2mo ago
Probably a cambrian explosion of new startups. New stars are made of the refuse of old ones.
hmokiguess 2mo ago
Could we end up with a merger between them and Anthropic?
- steezeburger 2mo ago
  https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/#anthropic-and-openai-merge https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/#ant... > I think it’s very unlikely this happens, and if it does, it would be ruinous for everybody involved. The full snippet is in TFA.
  - hmokiguess 2mo ago
    hahahaah thank you, I asked too soon, realized later it was covered in there lol
midas89 2mo ago
your data get's sold
- kraig911 2mo ago
  This. I also think there'll be more local AI models to fill gaps and people see how we've become needlessly dependent and we start using AI responsibly.
throwaw12 2mo ago
Stock market might dip 20%+, because OpenAI is a large buyer of GPUs, RAMs, servers and disks, every chip company will be impacted from removing huge customer from their revenue. then flywheel effect might kick off and impact carriers and construction companies building data centers and delivering things there. which impacts investor trust and they might start pulling their money from AI companies, which in turn, they either need to increase prices or downsize their efforts
- mikewarot 2mo ago
  I find it hard to justify any conclusion other than we're about to repeat the crash of 1929 in terms of stock prices. Back then, stocks dropped 90% over 3 years. We'll be lucky if 10% actual value remains after the bonfire that's about to happen.
  - soupfordummies 2mo ago
    So, what, should I withdraw my 401k and buy physical gold?
    - overtone1000 2mo ago
      Uh oh, this is the comment chain where somebody is gonna say "fiat"
      - mikewarot 2mo ago
        Fiat money sure came in handy when 10% or more of the trees in my entire county were blow over toward the east. Long term, you're getting eaten by inflation, but when the power grid, and most cell sites are down, cash is still king. The real lesson I've learned is that a small generator consumes about 10 gallons of gasoline per day. There's no way to store enough of it to last through a total collapse, even if you could keep it from being stolen.
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      That's up to you, but if there is a crash it's very unlikely to be before a major hyperscaler decides to reduce or stop their infra expenditures (which isn't happening, like, quite the opposite). That's what I would personally see as the top signal, but it's pretty dumb to exit the whole market because of a possible crash at some point in the future, without anything you see as a catalyst. Also, gold is completely overrated, it's not at all a safe place where to put your money and you have no idea how it would correlate with an AI bubble burst
WarmWash 2mo ago
What happens if people realize Ed Zitron has been rage farming to harvest subscription dollars for a few years now?
- tyleo 2mo ago
  I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.
  - reticulates 2mo ago
    I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value. AI is a tool, a useful tool, an innovative tool, but technology has introduced innovative tool after innovative tool for years. Apache, Twitter’s Bootstrap, Pull to Refresh, React, Kubernetes, all innovative, all delivered real business value. Nobody invested hundreds of billions of capital into infrastructure for React. AI has endless use cases. Theres no evidence that these use cases deliver the value necessary to justify any capital expenditure. A technology can change the world and have no standalone business case. Business is boring. Money in, money out. We are still waiting for Anthropic and OpenAI to show how LLMs have moved the needle on business. Every single thing that an LLM can be used to deliver value for a business today can be achieved by a cheap to run open weight model that companies could host in house. Where does that leave the trillion+ worth of dollars being buried in the ground?
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      Another nuance: his position is that real economic value hasn't been demonstrated, and that due to how LLMs work, it cannot really be measured. Meaning the AI crowd actual believes are based on vibes and doesn't seem to match reality (also, of course, that there is a massive, insane misallocation of resources to the AI sector compared to the level of demand)
    - watwut 2mo ago
      His position is also that it is useless. It is pretty consistent and openly stated.
bogzz 2mo ago
Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials. His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years. edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.
- waffletower 2mo ago
  I had to use Google to find the comments after I read the story. Y-combinator moderation is far from invisible.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
  Zitron is really really good. He taught me the strategy of "screenshot all the wild AI-bro claims" to keep track of them and call them out when it all collapses. The comments here villifying him are wrong and unhinged. Sometimes you need to be disliked a little to correctly predict the future.
  - WarmWash 2mo ago
    >"screenshot all the wild AI-bro claims" to keep track of them and call them out when it all collapses. But have you done the same for Zitron? Because the AI-Bros have consistently been more accurate and Zitron consistently pretty wrong. Zitron proclaimed in (early) 2024 that LLMs were stuck because there was no more data to use, and synthetic data ruined models, so we were already at the brink of collapse.
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      Zitron predictions regarding LLMs, as technology, are meaningless. Literally nobody can predict the future, and he's not a computer scientist. What matters is his thesis for things that have actual numbers that can be verified. Look at the numbers and his claims, and decide for yourself if the thesis is valid
paxys 2mo ago
Not commenting on the rest of the piece but why is everyone assuming that OpenAI’s executive departures are all voluntary? Sam Altman has shown plenty of willingness to clean house among the top ranks in the past. He isn’t going to shy away from firing a revenue officer if targets aren’t being met.
- PKop 2mo ago
  I don't think they need to be voluntary to be pessimistic about the implication of the departures. It can be argued just as easily that so may high level execs being fired because of underperformance means OpenAI isn't achieving their goals. Revenue targets not being met is a large part of AI bubble promoters' thesis.
  - paxys 2mo ago
    The article asserts that executives are leaving because they know OpenAI will fail and so their shares will be worthless soon. That’s a much more extreme read of the situation than the company simply being behind on some internal goals.
nater5000 2mo ago
Just another article re-iterating the same bearish takes on these companies with sprinklings of quirky uses of profanity to let you know the author is a human. If you're not interested in reading the same thing you've been reading for the last few years, feel free to move on.
josefritzishere 2mo ago
This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27-econopocalypse-subprime-intelligence-e9a06136d109 https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27...
- waffletower 2mo ago
  A less bombastic quote from the cited Doctorow: " AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations". I am a big fan of Cory, but as a developer I tend to think that AI will continue to aid us in refining what we shovel as well as what was once already shoveled -- refining it from a carcinogen into a benign and load-bearing :D foundation. The metaphor is catchy, but may not be apt, unless somehow we unilaterally decide that use of AI itself is the cancer and we all act to eliminate it. I think a dismal fate for OpenAI and Anthropic is likely quite separate from the fate of AI itself, particularly for software development.
  - upboundspiral 2mo ago
    I think if you look at how AI is being used anywhere outside of computer science the quote makes a bit more sense. AI is being used to dehumanize people's jobs, provide bad customer service, a bunch of people are being fired for dubious benefit, people are being turned into accountability sinks (the AI is in charge of decisions, but the human takes the blame).
  - josefritzishere 2mo ago
    Doctorow is also funnier than Zitron.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
0x70run 2mo ago
[dead]
downrightmike 2mo ago
We all get 1TB ram in our PC as the default
1attice 2mo ago
Another excellent Zitron article. The actual numbers he presents are well sourced and, sadly, correct. Even if AI is the future of computing, we will have a 9.x economic earthquake headed our way. Read his articles carefully. Don't be distracted by the salt, the swearing is just there to help the numbers go down easier. Work it out with a pencil. For those of us with the usual innumeracy about billions, trillions, etc, it can be helpful to draw diagrams on graph paper. Also, @dang, unflag this please, it is well within the HN ambit.
Barbing 2mo ago
Unfairly flagged, bumped way off front page: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49347207 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49347207 It’s a long read with well-sourced numbers that make the point well.
watwut 2mo ago
I would watch it happen with glee. I dont know exactly what all the other bad side effects it would had. I assume it will sux majorly for a lot of people and would not like that. But, OpenAI investors and management loosing money and power would be the one part of it I would enjoy.
rf15 2mo ago
I guess it really shows how people like to ignore that there's just not that much money in the economy
throwaway127495 2mo ago
So many numbers.. such a cold explanation.. what this misses though is that the world is not ruled by logic, but rather by people and if the right people want these companies to succeed, they will succeed. At least some of them will because they are instrumental to implement the continental fortresses (including surveillance and police state) to deal with the climate and ecological collapse that the elites know is coming.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]

103 points by thelastgallon 2mo ago

I doubt they would go public if anthropic does and it’s a slaughter. Allowing anthropic to go first might be in their best interest.

sebastianconcpt 2mo ago

Edit the config of the AI startups you have properly designed to be platform agnostic and make it use the other platforms models, wait the CI green and deploy prod

PLenz 2mo ago

Probably a cambrian explosion of new startups. New stars are made of the refuse of old ones.

hmokiguess 2mo ago

Could we end up with a merger between them and Anthropic?

steezeburger 2mo ago
https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/#anthropic-and-openai-merge https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/#ant... > I think it’s very unlikely this happens, and if it does, it would be ruinous for everybody involved. The full snippet is in TFA.
- hmokiguess 2mo ago
  hahahaah thank you, I asked too soon, realized later it was covered in there lol

midas89 2mo ago

your data get's sold

kraig911 2mo ago
This. I also think there'll be more local AI models to fill gaps and people see how we've become needlessly dependent and we start using AI responsibly.

throwaw12 2mo ago

Stock market might dip 20%+, because OpenAI is a large buyer of GPUs, RAMs, servers and disks, every chip company will be impacted from removing huge customer from their revenue. then flywheel effect might kick off and impact carriers and construction companies building data centers and delivering things there. which impacts investor trust and they might start pulling their money from AI companies, which in turn, they either need to increase prices or downsize their efforts

mikewarot 2mo ago
I find it hard to justify any conclusion other than we're about to repeat the crash of 1929 in terms of stock prices. Back then, stocks dropped 90% over 3 years. We'll be lucky if 10% actual value remains after the bonfire that's about to happen.
- soupfordummies 2mo ago
  So, what, should I withdraw my 401k and buy physical gold?
  - overtone1000 2mo ago
    Uh oh, this is the comment chain where somebody is gonna say "fiat"
    - mikewarot 2mo ago
      Fiat money sure came in handy when 10% or more of the trees in my entire county were blow over toward the east. Long term, you're getting eaten by inflation, but when the power grid, and most cell sites are down, cash is still king. The real lesson I've learned is that a small generator consumes about 10 gallons of gasoline per day. There's no way to store enough of it to last through a total collapse, even if you could keep it from being stolen.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    That's up to you, but if there is a crash it's very unlikely to be before a major hyperscaler decides to reduce or stop their infra expenditures (which isn't happening, like, quite the opposite). That's what I would personally see as the top signal, but it's pretty dumb to exit the whole market because of a possible crash at some point in the future, without anything you see as a catalyst. Also, gold is completely overrated, it's not at all a safe place where to put your money and you have no idea how it would correlate with an AI bubble burst

WarmWash 2mo ago

What happens if people realize Ed Zitron has been rage farming to harvest subscription dollars for a few years now?

tyleo 2mo ago
I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.
- reticulates 2mo ago
  I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value. AI is a tool, a useful tool, an innovative tool, but technology has introduced innovative tool after innovative tool for years. Apache, Twitter’s Bootstrap, Pull to Refresh, React, Kubernetes, all innovative, all delivered real business value. Nobody invested hundreds of billions of capital into infrastructure for React. AI has endless use cases. Theres no evidence that these use cases deliver the value necessary to justify any capital expenditure. A technology can change the world and have no standalone business case. Business is boring. Money in, money out. We are still waiting for Anthropic and OpenAI to show how LLMs have moved the needle on business. Every single thing that an LLM can be used to deliver value for a business today can be achieved by a cheap to run open weight model that companies could host in house. Where does that leave the trillion+ worth of dollars being buried in the ground?
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    Another nuance: his position is that real economic value hasn't been demonstrated, and that due to how LLMs work, it cannot really be measured. Meaning the AI crowd actual believes are based on vibes and doesn't seem to match reality (also, of course, that there is a massive, insane misallocation of resources to the AI sector compared to the level of demand)
  - watwut 2mo ago
    His position is also that it is useless. It is pretty consistent and openly stated.

bogzz 2mo ago

Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials. His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years. edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.

waffletower 2mo ago
I had to use Google to find the comments after I read the story. Y-combinator moderation is far from invisible.
VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
Zitron is really really good. He taught me the strategy of "screenshot all the wild AI-bro claims" to keep track of them and call them out when it all collapses. The comments here villifying him are wrong and unhinged. Sometimes you need to be disliked a little to correctly predict the future.
- WarmWash 2mo ago
  >"screenshot all the wild AI-bro claims" to keep track of them and call them out when it all collapses. But have you done the same for Zitron? Because the AI-Bros have consistently been more accurate and Zitron consistently pretty wrong. Zitron proclaimed in (early) 2024 that LLMs were stuck because there was no more data to use, and synthetic data ruined models, so we were already at the brink of collapse.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    Zitron predictions regarding LLMs, as technology, are meaningless. Literally nobody can predict the future, and he's not a computer scientist. What matters is his thesis for things that have actual numbers that can be verified. Look at the numbers and his claims, and decide for yourself if the thesis is valid

paxys 2mo ago

Not commenting on the rest of the piece but why is everyone assuming that OpenAI’s executive departures are all voluntary? Sam Altman has shown plenty of willingness to clean house among the top ranks in the past. He isn’t going to shy away from firing a revenue officer if targets aren’t being met.

PKop 2mo ago
I don't think they need to be voluntary to be pessimistic about the implication of the departures. It can be argued just as easily that so may high level execs being fired because of underperformance means OpenAI isn't achieving their goals. Revenue targets not being met is a large part of AI bubble promoters' thesis.
- paxys 2mo ago
  The article asserts that executives are leaving because they know OpenAI will fail and so their shares will be worthless soon. That’s a much more extreme read of the situation than the company simply being behind on some internal goals.

nater5000 2mo ago

Just another article re-iterating the same bearish takes on these companies with sprinklings of quirky uses of profanity to let you know the author is a human. If you're not interested in reading the same thing you've been reading for the last few years, feel free to move on.

josefritzishere 2mo ago

This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27-econopocalypse-subprime-intelligence-e9a06136d109 https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27...

waffletower 2mo ago
A less bombastic quote from the cited Doctorow: " AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations". I am a big fan of Cory, but as a developer I tend to think that AI will continue to aid us in refining what we shovel as well as what was once already shoveled -- refining it from a carcinogen into a benign and load-bearing :D foundation. The metaphor is catchy, but may not be apt, unless somehow we unilaterally decide that use of AI itself is the cancer and we all act to eliminate it. I think a dismal fate for OpenAI and Anthropic is likely quite separate from the fate of AI itself, particularly for software development.
- upboundspiral 2mo ago
  I think if you look at how AI is being used anywhere outside of computer science the quote makes a bit more sense. AI is being used to dehumanize people's jobs, provide bad customer service, a bunch of people are being fired for dubious benefit, people are being turned into accountability sinks (the AI is in charge of decisions, but the human takes the blame).
- josefritzishere 2mo ago
  Doctorow is also funnier than Zitron.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

0x70run 2mo ago

[dead]

downrightmike 2mo ago

We all get 1TB ram in our PC as the default

1attice 2mo ago

Another excellent Zitron article. The actual numbers he presents are well sourced and, sadly, correct. Even if AI is the future of computing, we will have a 9.x economic earthquake headed our way. Read his articles carefully. Don't be distracted by the salt, the swearing is just there to help the numbers go down easier. Work it out with a pencil. For those of us with the usual innumeracy about billions, trillions, etc, it can be helpful to draw diagrams on graph paper. Also, @dang, unflag this please, it is well within the HN ambit.

Barbing 2mo ago

Unfairly flagged, bumped way off front page: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49347207 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49347207 It’s a long read with well-sourced numbers that make the point well.

watwut 2mo ago

I would watch it happen with glee. I dont know exactly what all the other bad side effects it would had. I assume it will sux majorly for a lot of people and would not like that. But, OpenAI investors and management loosing money and power would be the one part of it I would enjoy.

rf15 2mo ago

I guess it really shows how people like to ignore that there's just not that much money in the economy

throwaway127495 2mo ago

So many numbers.. such a cold explanation.. what this misses though is that the world is not ruled by logic, but rather by people and if the right people want these companies to succeed, they will succeed. At least some of them will because they are instrumental to implement the continental fortresses (including surveillance and police state) to deal with the climate and ecological collapse that the elites know is coming.

cindyllm 2mo ago
[dead]