AI: An Intelligent Scam (part 3)
AI is circular finance — a black hole that will leave little behind. Unlike the dot-com bust, which at least bequeathed us lasting communication infrastructure.
Well, hello again — the Cassandras are back.
OpenAI missed its targets in 2025. Both weekly active users and revenue fell short. Its CFO, Sarah Friar, privately told colleagues that OpenAI may not be able to honour its new contracts with hyperscalers and GPU manufacturers unless growth accelerates significantly. Worse, she also stated that OpenAI is currently not in a position to meet the stringent requirements of a public listing — the very thing she was hired to deliver when she joined in 2024.
Naturally, she and Sam Altman were quick to deny everything, dismissing the Wall Street Journal report as clickbait. A convenient label — except that its author, Berber Jin, is a rigorous, well-sourced journalist with no history of sensationalism or approximation whatsoever.
Here is where things stand today: for every dollar OpenAI earns, it mechanically generates $2.25 in losses. In other words, a billion-dollar increase in turnover triggers $2.25 billion in new losses. And the picture is no better at its rivals — Anthropic, Google, Mistral AI, xAI, and the rest. Everything argued in this piece applies equally to every other generative AI company in the game.
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