Open Your AI’s

OpenAI never has to worry. That must feel like a superhuman experience. Most of us, though? We have to worry about sales, profitability, and being competitive. Luckily (for them) in the world of artificial intelligence, OpenAI occupies a rare and paradoxical space: a company that has lost billions, makes unclear business decisions, and yet remains one of the most valuable entities in the tech industry. This is an all too common feature of companies who are composed of a certain type of founder, funder, and network. Most people do not ever get to live in this kind of world, where bankers are forgiving. Where lenders give you more money because of how much money you lost. To people who think that is normal, perhaps one day they will be in for a rude awakening. Maybe not.

These types of companies are – too funded to fail.

The idea is an evolution of “too big to fail” – a concept popularized during the 2008 financial crisis when banks became so essential to the economy that they could not be allowed to collapse. There is a misconception about the Magnificent 7, that they are essential businesses. They are not. If Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla all had their market capitalization evaporate overnight, but operations were in tact, the real economy would continue on. Yes, people would lose their jobs eventually, and things would be locally tumultuous for some time. Other computer and car companies would replace them.

Closed Door Meetings Keep OpenAI Alive

OpenAI (ChatGPT) was backed by Microsoft and has increasingly become embedded into the parlance of modern computing, so they enjoy a similar status. Despite reportedly losing nearly $5 billion in 2024 – OpenAI continues to raise capital, attract global users, and expand its product offerings without any real obligation to turn a profit. That’s the kind of privilege that only exists for those with connections at the highest echelons of the stock market, where financial viability is a secondary concern to valuation, positioning, and monopolistic equilibrium.

Calling this a startup is sort of insulting, actually, to anybody that has ever had to bootstrap something. However, that’s the way companies like OpenAI these days maintain the illusion that they are worth the financial speculation. If we lived in a world where real competition existed, I could easily demonstrate to the market how you could build a company better than OpenAI which at least lost less money, if not found a way to turn a real profit. Today, due to the advances that OpenAI and others have made in this field of “artificial intelligence” we could also build faster/better than them.

But this company doesn’t have to face that kind of scrutiny, or competitive pressure.

The reality is that OpenAI doesn’t have to operate like a normal business. It doesn’t need to hustle to survive. It doesn’t need to optimize its sales channels or even understand how to price its own products effectively. It has the luxury of making costly mistakes. Mistakes that would destroy a smaller company – because OpenAI is part of an exclusive club of tech giants who compete just enough to look separate but operate more like a cartel. That’s the problem with American innovation.

OpenAI’s Trillion-Dollar Blind Spot

OpenAI could be a trillion-dollar company today if they truly understood their competitive position and attacked. It has the user base, the funding, and the AI models capable of reshaping industries. Tesla & Meta are both not AI companies who are developing a lot of AI right now, and these two companies were both at one time valued at a trillion dollars. Yet, Altman & Musk have only ever had play-fights in public, and Zuckerberg and Altman have never squared off in any real way. Instead of having to aggressively seek market dominance, OpenAI gets to play by a different set of rules.

The Corporate Chessboard: Why OpenAI Won’t Be Allowed to Win Big

In a world where Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon control nearly every major tech vertical, there is little room for a new trillion-dollar titan to emerge unless they play by the unwritten rules of the monopolistic stock market.

If OpenAI were to compete too aggressively now – if it truly optimized its business model, simplified AI adoption, and made its tools indispensable to every business – it would start encroaching on the domains of its benefactors.

• Microsoft has an overwhelming stake in OpenAI and is integrating it into its cloud infrastructure, but it doesn’t want OpenAI to outshine Azure.
• Apple is developing its own AI solutions and has no interest in a third-party model setting the industry standard.
• Google is OpenAI’s direct competitor in AI but also a member of the tech oligarchy that quietly maintains market equilibrium.
• Amazon, despite appearing to be outside this fight, is still a cloud and AI player and wouldn’t benefit from an OpenAI monopoly either.

This is OpenAI’s blind spot: It is still playing the game as if it is a disruptive startup when in reality, it is a de facto monopoly-in-training. Whether Sam Altman, Bret Taylor, or the other board members at OpenAI realize this (they probably do) or not, I would suspect that most of the people watching them pretend to compete, do not.

The Hustle OpenAI Has Never Had to Learn

0 people involved with this company in a meaningful way, have had to struggle financially in their lives. They don’t know what it does to your mind. To survive getting your electricity shut off, or being evicted. Getting sued when you can’t afford an attorney. Being arrested. Having medical bills bankrupt you. These are things Americans and people all over the world deal with. Those are people who OpenAI is trying to sell a $20/year AI model to. They are constrained in ways they don’t realize or care about. But they will have to care about this soon because the barriers to enter the technology sector are falling apart fast these days.

The Difference Between a Business and a Financial Vehicle

In the real world, businesses survive by selling every day. They refine their sales strategies, optimize their pricing models, and respond to competitive pressures. 

OpenAI, by contrast, exists in a different category. They are a company that survives not by selling, but by securing more investments and maintaining the perception of valuation. This fundamental disconnect is why OpenAI seems incapable of understanding how to create clear, competitive pricing structures or develop a coherent product strategy. One day that might actually matter.

Consider the following examples of OpenAI’s bizarre approach to business:

1. The $20K/Month Model With No Clear Value Proposition
   • OpenAI recently launched a $20,000 per month model, but it is unclear how this differs in any practical way from the $20/month model.
   • Researchers and organizations would likely get better results by hiring three people at $20/month and spending the remaining $239,280 on better equipment, compute power, and custom-built tools.
   • This suggests that OpenAI lacks a real-world understanding of how research teams and businesses actually operate.
2. Sam Altman’s Twitter Experimentation with Pricing
   • Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently asked on Twitter what people thought of a token-based pricing model where the $20/month ChatGPT Plus fee would be converted into tokens that users could spend on different models.
   • This reveals OpenAI’s uncertainty about how to structure its own revenue streams and reflects the industry’s overreliance on complex, unnecessary token-based pricing.
   • Most businesses and consumers don’t want to think in tokens – they want clear, simple pricing structures that make sense for their needs.
   • Also…the CEO of the company is asking TWITTER for advice???
3. The $14M Super Bowl Ad That Did Nothing
   • OpenAI spent $14 million on a Super Bowl ad that was widely ignored.
   • The ad failed to highlight a compelling feature set, did not generate viral discussion, and did not seem to result in any noticeable increase in subscriptions or enterprise adoption.
   • This is a perfect example of OpenAI’s financial privilege – a smaller company that burned $14M on a failed ad campaign would suffer catastrophic consequences. For OpenAI, it was just another line item.

What OpenAI Fails to See – Me

In the last year of researching the current technological capabilities of LLM products, I have come to learn the costs to enter are more nominal than they appear. Said another way, it doesn’t cost $15,000,000,000 to start an AI company.

At a certain point operational costs of server and compute rental may become out of reach, however, a small proof of concept in an AI service can be launched for virtually nothing. That is something which, if it were to be fully realized by the market, would cause a catastrophic collapse. Why?

Because companies in AI, computing, and software all rely on the presumption they have something nobody else has. Intelligence. Knowledge of how computers actually work. Programming. Things like that.

However, with human smarts, one can quickly figure out what all these *big brains* have missed. If you’re really looking, you can see glaring blind spots all over.

The Hidden Competitive Threat: Execution Over Valuation

OpenAI’s biggest weakness is that it doesn’t operate like a real-world business.

It lacks:

• A coherent sales strategy
• An intuitive pricing model
• A deep understanding of people

This creates an opening for competitors – not just the other tech giants, but also smaller, more agile startups that actually understand how to sell AI as a practical, accessible tool. Or…figuring out how to sell it as a true phenomenon, not just marketing hype.

The Challenge to OpenAI (or Any True Competitor)

Right now, OpenAI is too funded to fail.

They can afford very costly mistakes. They can afford unclear product launches, bad ads, and confusing pricing models. But that privilege won’t last forever.

The first company to:

• Make AI simple.
• Make AI understandable.
• Make AI undeniable.

…will win.