I happened to see a bunch of newswire reports that OpenAI had missed several key targets. Checking around, it seems some publications were reporting this as confirmed fact when it actually came from a Wall Street Journal article that “reportedly” mentioned the company may have missed both internal revenue and user growth targets. The company pushed back on the report (stating “they were firing on all cylinders”).
OpenAI is still privately held (but has plans for an IPO sometime this year). As a result, they do not have any legal obligations to report their financials publicly as would be the case once they are publicly traded. Could some insider be leaking this? Sure (but also unlikely considering how it would not strengthen their position with their IPO underwriters/once they go out on that IPO roadshow).
As much of a negative bear that I am regarding this AI hype (aka massive AI bubble), it’s also hard to take seriously reports like this without transparency into a slight bit more details (than something no different than the title of this post) including how large of a miss (the WSJ is IMHO, no longer as reputable as it once was; it’s another media publication under the control of Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp). These reports did cause shares of other companies including AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle to slide (maybe that was intention; to provide a trading opportunity for those equities).
Sure, I do know the whole of AI has been hyped up to these unsustainable levels. But I’d prefer to see verifiable information from these companies that are riding this hype, where I’ll feel a bit more certain about writing that the air is coming out of that bubble now (I can’t do that with this particular report).
