At a private gathering last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that the current investor excitement around AI might be setting the stage for significant financial losses. He was blunt: ‘Someone will lose a phenomenal amount of money.’ The company is mulling a secondary share sale that could put its valuation at around $500 billion – a striking jump from $300 billion earlier this year.
Drawing a parallel with the dot-com crash of the late 1990s, Altman suggested that the prevailing investor enthusiasm may be too optimistic. He painted a picture of the near future where OpenAI could invest trillions in data centre infrastructure and where ChatGPT might cater to billions of users each day – nearly half the world’s population.
Altman’s comments came on the heels of a Fortune report highlighting an MIT study titled ‘GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025.’ The study reveals a sobering truth: 95% of enterprise AI projects struggle to achieve rapid revenue growth, not because the models are flawed, but due to implementation hurdles. In practice, off-the-shelf AI solutions have a 67% success rate compared to roughly one-third for internally developed systems.
Even with these warning signs, Altman is still pushing for ambitious growth. OpenAI recently hit $1 billion in monthly revenue, though it’s expected to report a $5 billion annual loss. By normalising large-scale financial figures in AI debates, he aims to stress the necessary and distinct approach OpenAI is taking – one that plans to make major infrastructure investments.
The current AI landscape features heavy financial backing from tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Unlike many dot-com companies that once struggled with profitability, these established names have the financial muscle to absorb short-term setbacks in pursuit of long-term innovation.
If you’ve ever been wary of market bubbles, Altman’s frank admission might hit home: ‘I do think some investors are likely to get very burnt here, and that sucks. And I don’t want to minimise that.’ Yet his overall outlook remains upbeat, believing that the societal benefits of AI will eventually far outweigh the risks.
