I don’t think that is a unique position
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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- The $1 trillion number was floated not to scare investors, but to ward of competitors thinking to get in.
- The OpenAI business model is to be one of the two (or only one) standing on the ash heap once the whole thing crashes and burns. That's how Google and Amazon ended up owning their markets, post-dotcom.
- Once the only option, they'll optimize for services that generate the most revenue for the least investment and shut down all the miscellaneous side projects. The same way Google shuts down services when they don't hit the adoption numbers, users be damned.
- When there's only one or two companies left and all the users of closed companies have migrated over, they can bump up their monthly price to 2x or 3x. Where else you gonna go?
- Once the crash comes, whoever has the largest pile of cash becomes king and can pick up ready-to-roll data center infrastructure at fire-sale prices.
That's the long-term play, not how much they're making now.
The $1 trillion number was floated not to scare investors, but to ward of competitors thinking to get in.
I suspect it was both. OpenAI is burning through cash at a rate that's completely unprecedented, and the only way to keep that going is with a constant influx of VC money. Either that, or start turning a profit... but that's about as likely as aliens arriving and fixing all of our problems.
Since when did zitron paywall his posts?? I usually read them and I understand giving content away for free is largely unsustainable, but I'm too unemployed to want to pay $7/mo
He started writing one post per week in June. Previously, it was one per month. The one per month is still free. Personally, I believe it's fair wanting to get paid for the additional content.
He also reads out the paywalled articles in his podcast "Better Offline", if you don't want to pay.
Use firefox, it has an icon at the end of the URL that allows a reading mode, this bypasses paywall scripts
That won't work if the check is server side, and they don't send the article content to you at all without paying. That seems to be the case here.
It's such a pity too, because surely there's actual money to be made from consulting with industry on optimization of all sorts of processes and products or grant money to obtain by helping looking through large scientific datasets etc. You know, useful stuff.
Instead, these twats wasting ridiculous amounts of electricity and hardware on building better echo-chambers.
They are clearly targeting very broad audiences instead of any specific processes or operations any one company may do. It’s part of their view that they are working on general intelligence. Not specific intelligence.
I agree that it may be a less productive approach. Especially since pure scaling did hit a wall. Even if everyone and their sycophantic singularity cheerleaders say otherwise.
They are clearly targeting very broad audiences instead of any specific processes or operations
That's why I believe OpenAI will eventually go down the shitter, because they don't have a good usecase. Instead, they're trying to do a "one fits all" approach and burn a ton of money in the process.
Companies like Claude Code might be here to stay, because they're running (and improving) their own models and they focus on a single usecase. Claude is already much better than ChatGPT when it comes to generating useful code.
But we'll see what happens when the bubble inevitably bursts, because they all seem to be hitting a ceiling already and the improvements within each iteration get more and more marginal.
The "undifferentiated service for all the world" business seems to eventually pivot to advertising. Facebook, Google, etc.
So eventually ChatGPT won't shut up about the new Ford Maverick.
It would have still had the flaws and issues inherit with the process, but imagine current level LLMs that were trained on data that was curated and responsibly collected. It would also have helped to have the training emphasis on being accurate and search for verification and clarify, rather than be pleasing and agreeable to a fault. In the end it's not AGI and can't be alone, but the methods chosen was the direction that would be profitable and that's where and why we are here now.