Every time I open my feed, someone is confidently predicting OpenAI's inevitable rise into some trillion dollar techno empire. And honestly, sure, it's impressive. But the more I watch this whole thing unfold, the more it feels like everyone is ignoring the very obvious cracks under the shiny stuff.
Let me start with the part nobody wants to admit. OpenAI is trying to grow so fast, in so many directions at once, that it's starting to look less like strategy and more like panic. Browsers. Phones. Custom chips. Cloud deals with half the Fortune 50. Government contracts. Social media experiments. A rumored IPO bigger than the GDP of small countries. It's like watching someone sprint across a frozen lake and hoping the ice doesn't complain.
People keep referencing that Wall Street Journal piece that basically pitched the idea that OpenAI is trying to become too big to fail. As in, if you tie yourself tightly enough to Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, AMD, Amazon, and the Department of Defense, nobody can afford to let you sink. It's a little like those banks in 2008, except instead of bad mortgages you have hallucinating chatbots and billion dollar data centers.
The narrative goes something like this. Sam Altman is threading himself through every economic layer possible. Consumer? Check. Enterprise? Check. Government? Big check. Culture? Absolutely. Politics? Working on it. And if he can wrap enough of the global economy around OpenAI's ankles, well, who's going to let the company fall into a crater? Not the people whose chips, contracts, and infrastructure he just superglued himself to.
Now, to be fair, not everyone thinks this is a doomsday scenario. Tyler Cowen wrote one of the more optimistic responses I’ve seen. His take, in plain English, is basically: even if this whole thing is messy, at least it's an engine. Something pushing the American economy forward at a time when very few industries have the horsepower to do it. According to him, Wall Street's obsession makes perfect sense. Without AI, the economy is like a tired dog lying in the sun. With AI, at least the dog occasionally stands up.
But here's the part that gnaws at me. Engines can overheat. And when you're pumping hundreds of billions into datacenters that might not generate equivalent productivity gains, you're basically betting the house on the idea that the future will arrive on schedule. If it doesn't, you're stuck with giant power hungry server farms and a lot of very impatient investors.
There’s also this uncomfortable possibility: AI works, but not at the scale people expect. Maybe it gets smarter. Maybe it transforms some industries. But maybe it doesn't rewrite civilization the way the hype cycles keep promising. In that scenario, the companies spending these wild sums get bruised. But OpenAI? They get steamrolled.
I keep coming back to this idea of a bubble that isn't exactly a failure, just too inflated for its own good. The industry could keep functioning, models could keep improving, but the economics just don’t justify the burn rate. Imagine building a gold mine only to find out the veins are thinner than advertised. You still have gold, sure, but not enough to pay back the loans.
And yet, if you're tied into every major tech titan, plus the government, plus consumer markets, plus enterprise infrastructure, walking away becomes impossible. Everyone holds a small piece. Nobody wants the chain reaction that comes with letting the core collapse. At that point, OpenAI doesn’t succeed. It gets rescued.
Personally, I think the whole situation sits on a knife edge. It's not doom. It's not utopia. It's something in the middle, and the middle can be both boring and terrifying at once. Maybe OpenAI becomes the standard infrastructure layer of the next decade. Or maybe it becomes this giant balloon that the entire economy awkwardly holds in place because letting it drop would cause too much noise.
If you ask me, the most dangerous part isn't the tech. It's the narrative. When a company starts believing its own mythology, that's when strange decisions get made. And OpenAI is swimming in myths. AGI timelines. Singularities. Billion dollar partnerships. A valuation that swings from five hundred billion to a trillion like it's loose change. It's hard to know where the real company ends and the cinematic version begins.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Sam Altman really is playing 4D chess and we're all just watching from the cheap seats. Still, it wouldn't hurt to remember that even the smartest people in tech make spectacular mistakes. Sometimes it's not the villains or the visionaries who shape the story. It's the blind spots.
And right now, OpenAI has a few big ones. The kind you can see from far away if you stop squinting.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to argue with me. I'm used to it by now.
— MASHRAF AIMAN
AGS NIRAPAD Alliance
Co-founder, CTO, OneBox
Co-founder, CTO, Zuttle
Top comments (0)