What Happens If OpenAI Dies?

edgyquant

I doubt they would go public if anthropic does and it’s a slaughter. Allowing anthropic to go first might be in their best interest.

sebastianconcpt

Edit the config of the AI startups you have properly designed to be platform agnostic and make it use the other platforms models, wait the CI green and deploy prod

PLenz

Probably a cambrian explosion of new startups. New stars are made of the refuse of old ones.

hmokiguess

Could we end up with a merger between them and Anthropic?

midas89

your data get's sold

throwaw12

Stock market might dip 20%+, because OpenAI is a large buyer of GPUs, RAMs, servers and disks, every chip company will be impacted from removing huge customer from their revenue. then flywheel effect might kick off and impact carriers and construction companies building data centers and delivering things there. which impacts investor trust and they might start pulling their money from AI companies, which in turn, they either need to increase prices or downsize their efforts

WarmWash

What happens if people realize Ed Zitron has been rage farming to harvest subscription dollars for a few years now?

bogzz

Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials. His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years. edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.

paxys

Not commenting on the rest of the piece but why is everyone assuming that OpenAI’s executive departures are all voluntary? Sam Altman has shown plenty of willingness to clean house among the top ranks in the past. He isn’t going to shy away from firing a revenue officer if targets aren’t being met.

nater5000

Just another article re-iterating the same bearish takes on these companies with sprinklings of quirky uses of profanity to let you know the author is a human. If you're not interested in reading the same thing you've been reading for the last few years, feel free to move on.

josefritzishere

This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27...

downrightmike

We all get 1TB ram in our PC as the default

1attice

Another excellent Zitron article. The actual numbers he presents are well sourced and, sadly, correct. Even if AI is the future of computing, we will have a 9.x economic earthquake headed our way. Read his articles carefully. Don't be distracted by the salt, the swearing is just there to help the numbers go down easier. Work it out with a pencil. For those of us with the usual innumeracy about billions, trillions, etc, it can be helpful to draw diagrams on graph paper. Also, @dang, unflag this please, it is well within the HN ambit.

Barbing

Unfairly flagged, bumped way off front page: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49347207 It’s a long read with well-sourced numbers that make the point well.

watwut

I would watch it happen with glee. I dont know exactly what all the other bad side effects it would had. I assume it will sux majorly for a lot of people and would not like that. But, OpenAI investors and management loosing money and power would be the one part of it I would enjoy.

rf15

I guess it really shows how people like to ignore that there's just not that much money in the economy