Outside the Box
No tech company owed money by OpenAI would be bankrupted by the AI giant’s demise
Last Updated:
First Published:
OpenAI had losses of $5.3 billion on revenue of $3.5 billion in 2024 and losses of $7.8 billion on revenue of $4.3 billion in the first half of 2025. The artificial-intelligence giant forecasts $115 billion in cumulative losses by 2029, which is most likely an underestimate.
OpenAI has nonetheless raised hundreds of billions of dollars for AI research and infrastructure — with no realistic way to generate a reasonable return on this massive investment. As I have argued elsewhere, scaling is not going to make large language models (LLMs) intelligent and expert training leaves LLMs unreliable in cases where they have not been given explicit instructions. The disappointing business performance of LLMs confirms that LLMs cannot be trusted in cases where the costs of mistakes are substantial — and this limits the potential revenue from business applications.
