OpenAI going under may well drag many down with them

by beattherush, Chicago, Tuesday, June 02, 2026, 13:41 (7 days ago) @ HumanRobot

The circular financing involved in AI model development <> compute and infrastructure has swamped actual valuations at this point.

If OpenAI's orders drop off the books for NVIDIA....

There's a reason OpenAI is pulling products and "focusing on core." And frantically getting their IPO out the door.

In my view, firms are going to need both model development capability AND model distribution/monetization capability to be successful.

OpenAI has the former, but not the latter.
Anthropic did a decent job on the latter by concentrating on corporate customers.
Oracle I can't figure out other than Ellison's had too much Michigan hookers and blow.
Microsoft has a hand in the former but is focused on the latter and figure if OpenAI goes away, there's many fish in the sea.
Mistral I've lost track of, no idea.

Winners/survivors:
Google
X
probably Anthropic

And to your point on data centers: not only do you have to operate them, you have to rebuild them every five years as compute power continues to scale. Not cost-justified for many smaller workloads.