OpenAI has not been having a great year…
As it completes its metamorphosis from a non-profit organization operating for the good of humanity to a shareholder focused company gearing up for one of the biggest IPOs in history… it has come up against some… uhh… teething problems.
It is facing legal challenges over the fair use of intellectual property, legal challenges over its governance, legal challenges over the safe use of its tools, talent churn amongst its top developers, and now significant reputational damage amongst effectively all of its stakeholders.
All of this wasn’t helped by its willingness to embrace what many see as war profiteering, further straying from their original stated goal in order to chase revenue wherever it can find it… because well I mean, fully autonomous AI killbots, and mass surveillance systems, don’t really sound like they are improving the future of humanity…
In response to this, over just the last weeks, some of even the most staunch AI optimists have spoken out against the decisions this company has been making.
But anyway… All of this is on top of the biggest and most immediate problem of all… which is that OpenAI is simply burning billions of dollars every month, on top of trillions of dollars in future spending commitments with no clear answer for how it’s going to get that money…
Now maybe this would all be ok if it was still the undisputed leader in this world changing technology, but, in the last three years several other models from better funded companies have come along and either matched or exceeded OpenAI’s capabilities.
It’s become unclear if the early pioneers of this technology have spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing systems that can now be effectively replicated by random Swedish men in their bedroom…
It’s also becoming less clear exactly how world changing this technology really is going to be in the first place, putting more question marks over the company’s future.
For now its investors are doubling down. Just last week, Amazon (who is theoretically a competitor), Nvidia (a supplier) and (the ever reliable) Softbank, announced a record investment of 110 billion dollars in additional funding, which will keep the GPUs on for another few months…
But this lifeline has (in turn) presented another potential issue that would almost sound absurd, (if it wasn’t for a growing pool of people raising the alarm bells over it)…
Open AI (alongside some other big names) have now become SO valuable in private markets that if they really DO all go public this year, their collective weighting could legitimately… “break the stockmarket”…