OpenAI, in deep trouble

Maybe burning money isn’t the answer

The early reviews of GPT 4.5

Early reviews of GPT 4.5 have been absolutely brutal. Here’s a sample:

The comments from Howard, a pioneer in large language models, and general a fan of Generative AI, are especially damning.

And the thing is, this is not just some random release. This was OpenAI’s best shot, post DeepSeek, to show that they are still the king.Instead, they swung and missed.

GPT 4.5 appears to be the system that was supposed to be GPT-5, relabeled in order to manage expectations downwards. And even so, with the less ambitious label, people were still disappointed.

And of course, there is still no GPT-5, even after two years, of hype, bullshit, and cryptic hints.

GPT 4.5, vibes and all, are the best Altman’s got. He was bluffing the whole time.

When he told us “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it”, he was obviously fibbing. Why anyone ever took his act so seriously, I will never know.

Where OpenAI is now

They still have the brand name, a lot of data and tons of (mostly unpaid) users, but:

• GPT 4.5 is hugely expensive.

• Even so it offers no decisive advantage over competitors; there is basically zero moat.

• Scaling hasn’t gotten them —or anyone else — to AGI.

Scaling hasn’t worked out as originally planned.

• OpenAI’s GPT-5 project thus far has been a failure; there is already starting to be an “is that all they have got reaction?” to GPT 4.5, as illustrated in the brutal early reviews.

• DeepSeek led to a price war that cuts potential profits.

• There is still no killer app with a clear business model.

• OpenAI is likely still losing money on every prompt.

• A bunch of investment turns to debt if they can’t make the transition to nonprofit fast enough, and Elon has perhaps upped the cost.

• Many many top people have left (Sutskever, Murati, Schulman, recently, Amodei and Karpathy before, etc and many, many more).

• Some have started serious competitors with similar IP.

• Because OpenAI’s burn rate is so high (perhaps on the order of a couple billion dollars a month), they have limited runway, even after last year’s massive financing.

• Microsoft no longer fully has their back.

• Altman’s credibility has diminished.

• Sora went nowhere; Google’s Veo2 is probably better.

• Whatever lead OpenAI had two years ago has been squandered.

If Masayoshi Son changes his mind about investing tens of billion of dollar in them, OpenAI will have serious cash problems. (And Elon is right that they don’t have all or most of the Stargate funding in hand).

Altman was the right CEO to launch ChatGPT, but he may not have the intellectual vision to get them to the next level.

In short, potential investors should be asking hard questions, both about Sam, as a technical manager, and about the company’s ability to deliver.

Gary Marcus has been warning the field for years that pure statistical approaches like LLMs probably wouldn’t suffice for AGI. Half a trillion dollars later, it looks like maybe he had a point.