OpenAI fails to achieve goals as computing costs pile up: report

OpenAI faces a reckoning over the gap between its ambitions and its money, experts said Decryptionafter Wall Street Journal It reported on Monday that the company had failed to meet key internal goals for ChatGPT users and revenue, while CFO Sarah Friar privately warned that ballooning computing costs could exceed incoming funds.

Friar raised the alarm after the company failed to meet its goal of reaching 1 billion weekly active ChatGPT users by the end of last year, a milestone it never achieved or announced, worrying some investors. Wall Street Journal I mentioned.

“When the dust settles, I think companies will discover something they already knew — a lot of work still depends on human judgment, collaboration, and contextual understanding that AI can’t yet emulate,” said Alice Lee, investment partner at Foresight Ventures. Decryption.

Lee sees the current pressure as an internal rebalancing within the technology sector, rather than a leading indicator of a broader economic downturn.

OpenAI spending

OpenAI is secured About 600 billion dollars In future data center spending, built up through years of aggressive dealmaking under Altman’s thesis that compute scarcity was the real barrier to AI growth.

The report said Fryar told other company leaders that she was concerned that revenues might not grow fast enough to cover those contracts.

Board members reportedly investigated further the data center deals and questioned why Altman continued to pursue more computing capacity despite the slowdown.

Anthropic has quietly outperformed OpenAI on stock trading platform Forge Global, where it now trades Nearly $1 trillion for OpenAI Nearly $880 billion, according to Forge CEO Kelly Rodricks, the first time its competitor has had a higher implied valuation.

said Marcus Levin, co-founder of DePIN XYO Network Decryption To read the market crash into these numbers is to misread the fundamental data.

He noted that by the end of 2025, nearly 84% of the world’s working-age population has not yet used generative AI tools, and only about 44.8 million people have paid AI subscriptions globally.

“Confusing a slow, uneven adoption curve with an impending market reckoning reflects tunnel vision that is contradicted by the data,” Levin said.

He noted that this disruption is real but narrowly focused, driven more by over-employment cycles and cost corrections in the technology sector than by the automation sweeping through the broader economy.

“A rational repricing phase is almost inevitable, as market sentiment tends to move ahead of fundamentals, and expectations need to be reset,” Lee said.

It positions current valuations as pre-priced rather than fundamentally broken, with fundamentals likely to catch up if capability development remains on track.

Decryption I have reached out to OpenAI for comment.

said Pavel Pezin, CFO at artificial intelligence developer Napoleon IT Decryption The pattern is familiar from previous technology cycles, and the outcome is not predetermined.

“In human history, such breakthroughs often preceded crises and recessions, but they were never their direct cause,” he said.

Bezin pointed to the dot-com crash as a lesson: economic systems built on outdated models fail to adapt, and it is this failure, not the technology itself, that leads to collapse.

He added: “If global financial institutions learn the right lessons from the dot-com bust, discussions of recession and systemic collapse will remain nothing more than cautionary tales.”

OpenAI’s IPO ambitions Caught in the middle of all this, Altman is seeking a public listing by the end of the year, while Friar has privately warned that the company’s internal controls are not yet set to the reporting standards required by public markets. In the prediction market Myriad, owned by DecryptionParent company Dastan, users put a 64% chance Anthropic should do an IPO before OpenAI.

Away from the board of directors, Altman has spent the past week apologizing To the community of Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia, after OpenAI admitted it blocked the ChatGPT account associated with the suspect in a February mass shooting that killed eight people without ever notifying law enforcement.