Financial Expert Says OpenAI Is on the Verge of Running Out of Money

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Noel Joshua Hadley

The AI industry continues to pour tens of billions of dollars into resource-intensive models and the infrastructure to run them. In the face of it all, their promises of kickstarting a technological revolution that could one day be immensely profitable remain convincing enough for investors to prop up sky-high valuations — at least for now.

But actually turning a profit is likely many years away for the vast majority of AI companies, and that’s if it ever comes. Who will stand to benefit from the rampant expenditures also remains a subject of heated debate, as corporations like Google, Meta, and OpenAI continue to race each other for dominance in the space.

Google and Meta already have successful businesses doing other things, but OpenAI doesn’t. That hasn’t stopped it from committing to spend well over $1 trillion before the end of the decade, an astronomical and extremely risky bet on scale even as its revenue lags. Users have shown a low willingness to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions, and the company has only begun exploring other revenue-generating avenues.

It all adds up to an enormous unanswered question: how long can OpenAI keep burning cash?

In a new essay for the New York Times, Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations, predicts that the Sam Altman-led company could run out of money “over the next 18 months.”

He argued that OpenAI’s competitors, industry stalwarts like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, could use the money they earned from their legacy businesses to pour hundreds of billions into developing and scaling their AI models — while OpenAI doesn’t have that luxury.

Mallaby is no AI hater. He’s extremely bullish on AI overall, arguing that “businesses usually take decades to deploy new technologies successfully,” whereas the AI industry has made “striking” progress in just three years.

In other words, Mallaby isn’t betting against a growing AI bubble — he’s singling out his predicted winners and losers of the ongoing AI race. And despite becoming a household name after the launch of ChatGPT just over three years ago, he expects OpenAI to become a footnote in AI history less than two years from now.

While OpenAI has raised record amounts of funding for a private company, the company is still “hemorrhaging cash,” burning through more than $8 billion in 2025 alone.

“Even if OpenAI reneges on many of those promises and pays for others with its overvalued shares, the company must still find daunting sums of capital,” Mallaby wrote. “However rich the eventual AI prize, the capital markets seem unlikely to deliver.”

After running out of cash, the researcher suggested that OpenAI could be “absorbed by Microsoft, Amazon or another cash-rich behemoth.”

But even with one of the biggest names in the game going under, Altman and his company will leave a lasting legacy behind, Mallaby argued.

An “OpenAI failure wouldn’t be an indictment of AI It would be merely the end of the most hype-driven builder of it,” he wrote.

Many other experts agree that 2026 could be a “make-or-break year” for OpenAI as pressure on the industry continues to mount.

Altman is holding onto his guns, declaring “code red” and doubling down on ChatGPT to keep up with the firm’s biggest competitor, Google.

“This is the WeWork story on steroids,” one venture capital boss, who is invested in one of OpenAI’s rivals, told The Economist last month. The coworking space company famously collapsed like a house of cards and went bankrupt in 2023 after years of turmoil, churning through billions of dollars by leasing and buying commercial real estate.

More on OpenAI: ChatGPT Killed a Man After OpenAI Brought Back “Inherently Dangerous” GPT-4o, Lawsuit Claims

The post Financial Expert Says OpenAI Is on the Verge of Running Out of Money appeared first on Futurism.

Sacred Scripture

Acts 28 ends abruptly and that’s never sat right with me. With the inclusion of Acts 29, we are given a nice well-rounded finale to Luke’s biography and some interesting closure to Pontius Pilate as well. Join me as I continue my Lost Books of the Bible series on YouTube, reading from Acts 29, 3 Corinthians, and the Phoenix of Tertullian.

You can read along with these texts and more on our Sacred Scripture page. 

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Read the 9/11 Interviews

Watch the Interviews