What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
- ID: 5ef65971
- 原文链接: https://www.wheresyoured.at/p/what-happens-if-openai-dies
- 分类: industry
- 来源类型: article
- 标签: openai, finance, ai-bubble, compute, industry-analysis
- 质量评分: 4/5
- 抓取时间: 2026-08-20T00:00:00+08:00 (fetched via opencli)
中文导读
Ed Zitron 逐笔拆解 OpenAI 财务：2025 年营收 131 亿美元亏 209 亿，2026 Q1 非 GAAP 经营利润率 -122%；按其自身预测 2030 年需 2840 亿美元年收入才能覆盖 8000 亿美元级算力承诺，比 NVIDIA/TSMC/Samsung 三家 FY2026 营收总和还多 27%。他判断 OpenAI 需以每年约 1000 亿美元速度继续募资，并列出三种结局：被 Microsoft 吸收、把 Altman 当泡沫替罪羊任其倒下、与 Anthropic 合并；SoftBank/NVIDIA/Amazon/Google 的循环交易是唯一支撑。
为什么值得关注
把 OpenAI 的死法算成账本：2840 亿收入对 8000 亿算力承诺，三种结局都配好了数字
Summary (English)
Ed Zitron walks through OpenAI's finances line by line: a $20.9B loss on $13.07B revenue in 2025, a -122% non-GAAP operating margin in Q1 2026, and a self-projected need for $284B annual revenue by 2030 to support $800B+ compute commitments - 27% more than NVIDIA, TSMC and Samsung's combined FY2026 revenue. He argues OpenAI must keep raising on the order of $100B a year and lays out three endings: absorption by Microsoft, letting the company die with Altman as the bubble's scapegoat, or a merger with Anthropic, with circular deals from SoftBank, NVIDIA, Amazon and Google as the only scaffolding.
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Excerpt
What Happens If OpenAI Dies?
发布时间: 2026-08-18T15:23:40.000Z
原文链接: https://www.wheresyoured.at/p/what-happens-if-openai-dies
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I’m not trying to be a buzzkill here, but I have meaningful concerns about OpenAI’s ability to survive, and they’ve only grown more pressing in the last few years. In the same week that it completed a $7 billion internal share buyback, OpenAI saw both COO (and former CFO) Brad Lightcap and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Denise Dresser leave the company, the latter of which had only been there eight months, and had this to say a mere four months ago:
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“I just have never seen this level of conviction spread so quickly and consistently within the industries,” Dresser told CNBC in April, as she was wrapping up her first 90 days on the job.
Dresser likely walked away from a large amount of stock options by leaving after less than a year on the job, which I’m guessing means she decided that staying at OpenAI would, for whatever reason, not be worth getting what I imagine are tens of millions of dollars of stock she would be able to liquidate when it went public. You know, that thing that’s definitely happening.
Unless it’s _not quite so definite_ anymore. Back in late June, The New York Times reported OpenAI was “leaning toward” going public some time in 2027, but that was before Anthropic started one of the most-aggressive pre-IPO marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen, with investors “leaking” to the Financial Times that they thought it would have a $2 trillion valuation and have (sigh) annualized revenues of $100 billion to $120 billion by end of 2026, an entirely fictional statement made with the intent of pumping their bags, with the FT, for whatever reason, printing it with little pushback.
Yet what’s likely far-scarier for OpenAI is that even Anthropic’s pre-IPO marketing has a whiff of desperation. A Reuters report from late last week that feels precision-engineered to manipulate dimwitted investors said that “Wall Street \[was\] looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now,” adding that it was “projecting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion.”
This was arguably the worst part:
Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business.
For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows.
While I imagine the writer in question believed that this was being “fair” and “objective,” this paragraph exists only to manufacture consent for a company that clearly has questionable economics. “Current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale” is a euphemism for “ignore your lying eyes,” a plea with the audience to not judge a company based on its _actual business_ but on a _theoretical business_ that, to quote Reuters, have “...training and inference \[costs\] become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales.”
Could, could, could, could, _could, could could COULD!_ It’s always a bloody _could_ or _will_ or _might_ with these fucking companies, and it’s astonishingly bad journalism to see it as an “objective” choice to vaguely say that a company should not be evaluated based on its _actual_ business but on some _theoretical business_ that they _might build in the future_ where the _economics are completely different._
Sidenote: the defense of a statement like this is always that it’s “to show both sides,” but the article also fails to disclose that Anthropic loses billions of dollars a year, or that the AI labs are horribly unprofitable. It does, however, include that Anthropic had a “profitable quarter,” which is something that was only made possible with Musk’s discounts on its compute costs in May and June 2026. That fact is also left out of the article.
The reason I bring up the noises coming from the manufacturing consent machine is that if Anthropic beats OpenAI to an IPO, I cannot see a viable (or reasonable) path for Sam Altman to float his nasty little company. The fact that the Financial Times and Reuters are already being co-opted into softening the blow is a sign that Anthropic’s S-1 will look and smell like the inside of a tauntaun, and Anthropic is, from the reporting I’ve read, in a much better condition than OpenAI, if only because it didn’t have multiple side quests involving video generation or browsers or smart speakers, though [both companies lov
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