OpenAI is the new Enron
I'm certainly a bit of a doomsayer about the way a few US companies are forcing on us LLMs as the new miracle cure. Not because this flavor of AI is entirely worthless, but because its worth is quite blown up beyond reason, with the promise of we-don't-deliver-as-much-as-you-would-expect-yet-but-next-year-you-will-see-what-you-will-see.
Pretty much, like ten years ago when Musk was selling us a full robot-taxi world in 2020... That, and the consecutive drive to raise inordinate amounts of money, despite unit economics not making sense. (*)
I think you should probably read this piece about Sam Altman before this whole FOMO-driven market blows up in our face (**):
(...) the better comparison to OpenAI (...) might be Enron. Enron was a real company that built and owned a very real pipeline and energy infrastructure business. ChatGPT and Codex are very real, very impressive technologies. Enron’s operations were real, but the story they told to investors was a sham. OpenAI’s technology is undeniably real and blazing the frontier of AI. It’s the financial story Altman has structured that seems alarmingly circular.
(*) Short version: The only current business case for LLMs is mostly coding. The entire AI-native coding market is ~$600M–$1B ARR (2024). With OpenAI's current valuation at $852B, it should be 20-50x larger for this to make sense.
(**) I don't think the AI market is a scam; I think the way these companies oversell their business beyond reason is. One. Hundred. Percent.
