2. Selling tokens via long running agents is the only thing that's provably working with respect to revenue growth.
3. They need revenue yesterday. Increases in borrowing rates means access to capital isn't what it was in the 10s. Their runway is much shorter than you would imagine.
4. Some of the decision makers at these companies believe AI will exhibit Jevons Paradox and that any decrease in price will result in induced demand.
5. The frontier models are still subject to the limitations of AI. They're not good at everything. Better to have someone else learn that on their dime rather than yours.
Openai haven't yet amortised their current investments into the space and nor have they stopped making new ones.
I'm sure they'd be totally capable of bringing 1k new biz online but that's even more debt, and even more uncertainty.
This is a huge problem, why is it like this
In part it is like this because they've already borrowed so much.
Investment isn't debt.
If VC provide you funds, there is an expectation of returns, otherwise the board would vote you out.
Yeah it's not a traditional loan from a bank, but it's not a 0% interest loan either.
That's what is driving up the cost of debt and teetering some of these companies into junk status.
Down the chain you see what you need to do because you work directly with it everyday.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/televised-ne...
I think OpenAI actually will ultimately start a fleet of consultancy/SaaS spinoff companies, each perhaps short-lived until the core product does the job out of the box.
https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/36
That actually makes me wonder if Apple apps are not included because they come pre-installed.
Unlikely the people that start these 100 companies, across totally disparate fields, and care enough to take them to market are staff members at OpenAI.
And it's already obvious a single company can't split its attention enough to do tons of disparate things well (see OpenAI's previous attempts at Atlas, the social network, Dots, etc)
I've experienced the same thing in real life a couple of times over.
I think Einstein's quote "A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels." is apt. Apps will solve a bunch of problems, but if anyone can create those apps, there will be no market for them. I don't have the answers, but long term, it probably doesn't lie in selling apps. We've only just started.
At my regular job, we're just catching up on all the internal work we had. I think there is a real crunch in trying to figure out how to build moats and things that are hard to replicate that are sellable.
Maybe it will be the physical. Probably most of the moat will be made up of network effects and capital intensive processes. If I had the answer I'd probably be working on it right now.
You can't fail software project you don't start. But if you can sell tokens to company that fails, that's just profit for you!
LLMs aren't good enough to do project from start (and I mean actual start - getting requirements, figuring out the market etc.) to end. Hell it apparently isn't even good enough to run simple web store (even if it can write one).
It is a great multiplier for people that already know what they want to do, so they are selling to them.
Why go into the hamburger business when you think you've got an infinite profitability recipe on your hand potentially. The big AI houses have doubled down and quadrupled down on their core founding myth for better or worse.
The AI boom is a full send. Either this works in spectacular fashion or it blows in spectacular fashion.
OpenAI is selling people access to a tool to build things. OP is asking why they don’t just build the things themselves, which I believe is a fair question.
...a dubious proposition except this time there is a small but real chance it may be actual magic
Except they're called products - you don't open a new company for every new product you make.
And you don't make 100 - you focus the resources you have to try to build the most impactful things you can.
But you are right, building a business is a lot more than building a product. It’s also a lot more than just name recognition because they have no shortage of that either.
NVidia is good at making the shovels, and sticks to that.
It’s estimated NVidia sold 4.5-5.2 million gpus in 2025 with total revenue numbers at about $130b.
With this terrible math in mind, they could produce half of that and make substantially more money, basically an infinite money glitch.
The counter-argument is that the models might make business ideas just as fungible as anything else.
They're doing the other thing too via numerous startup acquisitions.
IMO the invention of AI is redefining what we think of as "intelligence". You would probably describe Albert Einstein as highly intelligent, and you'd probably also describe Bill Clinton as highly intelligent. Even before AI, you can easily look at that and see we aren't describing the same things even though we're using the same word. Einstein's intelligence is highly abstract, observational, mathematical. Clinton's is interpersonal, pursuasive, articulate, etc.
The AI we have today is extremely good at intellectual tasks like Einstein. It is not good at social intelligence and social agency like Clinton. Also, before you say that they can be really empathetic, persuasive, people are already socially dependent on them etc, that's not what I'm talking about. They are extremely knowledgeable about human socialising, but they cannot actually perform it. You could not set an AI out into the world to go and make a few friends.
I think the key moment will be if a single AI can get more than one person to care about what it has to say and what it's doing. Think about today how when someone tells you about their conversation with their AI agent, you probably roll your eyes because who cares, it's a highly individual experience.
Companies need a lot of this. They have to form relationships, become trusted amongst society, etc. AI cannot do this right now, and it's increasingly clear "intelligence" is not sufficient to do it, at least not in the way LLMs are intelligent. Maybe one day they will, but I'd imagine that will be another enormous leap in what AI even looks like akin to how ChatGPT was an enormous leap.
Why Even Anthropic Can’t Vibe-Code Away Salesforce
https://www.salesforceben.com/why-even-anthropic-cant-vibe-c...