1) They are far from profitability. 2) Meta is aggressively making their top talent more expensive, and outright draining it. 3) Deepseek/Baidu/etc are dramatically undercutting them. 4) Anthropic and (to a lesser extent?) Google appear to be beating them (or, charitably, matching them) on AI's best use case so far: coding. 5) Altman is becoming less like-able with every unnecessary episode of drama; and OpenAI has most of the stink from the initial (valid) grievance of "AI-companies are stealing from artists". The endless hype and FUD cycles, going back to 2022, have worn industry people out, as well as the flip flop on "please regulate us". 6) Its original, core strategic alliance with Microsoft is extremely strained. 7) and, related to #6, its corporate structure is extremely unorthodox and likely needs to change in order to attract more investment, which it must (to train new frontier models). Microsoft would need to sign off on the new structure. 8) Musk is sniping at its heels, especially through legal actions.
Barring a major breakthrough with GPT-5, which I don't see happening, how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company? Maybe the answer is they drop the frontier model aspect of their business? If we are really far from AGI and are instead in a plateau of diminishing returns that may not be a huge deal, because having a 5% better model likely doesn't matter that much to their primary bright spot:
Brand loyalty from the average person to ChatGPT is the best bright spot, and OpenAI successfully eating Google's search market. Their numbers there have been truly massive from the beginning, and are I think the most defensible. Google AI Overviews continue to be completely awful in comparison.