The Assembly@InTheAssembly
The cracks inside OpenAI are deepening, and the numbers don’t lie.
When your own CFO is sounding the alarm, something is seriously wrong.
Check this out:
1: OpenAI missed its target of 1 billion weekly active users, and missed multiple monthly revenue targets earlier this year, per WSJ
2: ChatGPT’s share of generative AI web traffic collapsed from 86.7% to 64.5% in just 12 months, while Google’s Gemini surged from 5.7% to 21.5%
3: CFO Sarah Friar has privately warned colleagues that OpenAI may not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t accelerate, and has been excluded from key infrastructure meetings by Altman as a result
4: Friar is also pushing back on Altman’s aggressive IPO timeline, saying the company is not organisationally ready to meet public company reporting standards
5: OpenAI has committed to roughly $600 billion in future data center spending, projections show the company could burn $200 billion before reaching steady cash flow, even after raising $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history
6: Altman’s own board is now questioning his spending decisions, and court proceedings in Musk’s lawsuit to oust Altman and unwind OpenAI’s for-profit conversion have just begun
The biggest AI company in the world is valued at $852 billion, and its own CFO isn’t sure it can pay its bills.
OpenAI is the biggest retail trap of the last decade.
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