As OpenAI continues its meteoric rise — boasting billions in revenue from ChatGPT and API usage while dominating headlines — the company faces a stark financial reality that could threaten its very existence. In a new New York Times opinion piece this week, historian and financial expert Sebastian Mallaby warns that despite massive fundraising rounds and explosive growth, OpenAI is hemorrhaging cash at an unprecedented scale, with projections suggesting it could run out of money within the next 18 months if current burn rates persist and new capital doesn’t materialize.
This dire prediction for OpenAI highlights the high-stakes gamble of frontier AI development: enormous compute costs, relentless R&D spending, and losses…