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.
Ad revenue doesn't come out of thin air. Unless budgets and TAM in the ad space increase (hint: they won't), the spend has to mostly come from cannibalizing META and Google. In that regard, I wish them luck - that will be a long and bloody battle. And both the established players can fight it longer than OAI because they have actually revenue streams and strong cash balances.
Every doom and gloom article about OpenAI is almost always speculation, with no actual evidence backing the claims. The issue is that people love a good "AI is going to fail" story, so it gets shot up to the front page. Unfortunately, some journalists now know that it can rake in clicks, so they will happily reduce their journalistic integrity to ride the wave.
Chatgpt is mostly worse than Gemeni too (arguably) and isn't nearly as rate limited. So they're already losing users and making their product a worse experiance than their competition.
Sure OpenAI will make some money from ads but will it be anything close to what it takes to quench the amount of money they're burning? It seems unlikely to me. They really need to be bought out by a sugar-momma who can afford to play this kind of game like MSFT.
Just see what is happening regarding Youtube ads. It began in a small way, and it's now unbearable to watch without uBlock Origin
> "Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time-highs (Jan 14 was the highest, Jan 13 was the second highest, etc.)"
This does not indicate that they're losing users, at all...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligenc...
This is assuming they don't build the vertical stack at all which is unlikely given their highly competent product team.
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.)
From where? There's not an infinite source of capital. There's already talk of junk bonds, CDS and private credit.
At some point the lenders look like the loan shark/death spiral finance options.