I don't think OpenAI will exist in a few years.
It is becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI will lose the AI race. I think it is now fair to say that Google has won. Unfortunately for OpenAI, Google's models are already better OpenAI's models, furthermore, the gap of resources between Google and OpenAI is massive, Google has so much more resources to improve their models even more beyond this point, Google has their own TPU hardware, Google has massive proprietary data from Youtube, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Search that they can use to train their models, Google has their own cloud infrastructure to host their models, and Google has an integrated ecosystem that they can use to deploy their newest AI models to billions of people instantly. While OpenAI is promising to spend a total of around 1 trillion dollars to build what Google already has. OpenAI has promised $250 Billion to Microsoft for their Azure cloud services, $300 Billion to Oracle to expand AI compute capacity, $350 Billion to Broadcom to make custom AI chips and networking equipment, as well as many other smaller deals to Amazon, Coreweave, Nvidia, and AMD. OpenAI can't afford those deals.
The Financials
OpenAI doesn't have the money and they will never have the money. Their current revenue is only $13 billion but they will have a net loss of around $27 billion this year. And I don't see a plausible path to profitability or even just breaking even for OpenAI, only around 5% of their users are paying for ChatGPT, and if OpenAI raises prices or restricts free features, then their customers would just go to competitors like Google, xAI, and Anthropic that offers better performance for a better price. On top of that, with open source models like Deepseek, Kimi K2, and Qwen3 already almost caught up, OpenAI doesn't have much options but to keep their free features and continue burning money in order to retain their market share.
You can see how desperate OpenAI is getting to try to become profitable. They are just throwing everything at the wall at this point but nothing is really sticking. You can see this with their AI video platform Sora that they tried to make like Tiktok and you can scroll AI generated videos, but that has been unsuccessful so far. They have also been considering putting ads into ChatGPT to make money off of free users, but I don't see that working out, especially since their competitors offers an ad-free experience. What's crazier is that they have previously banned everything remotely sexual or NSFW, but now they announced they will roll out an adult mode to talk about NSFW topics and to do "spicy roleplay" with ChatGPT. They have also just been signing random deals with everybody, they signed deals with Target, Walmart, TurboTax, Moderna, Sanofi, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Reddit to try to find any way to make money, and there are probably a lot more deals that I missed, but it hasn't been working out so far and OpenAI is still bleeding money.
The Magic Is Gone
OpenAI had the first mover advantage, ChatGPT was like magic. But today the magic is gone, the magic of ChatGPT has become a commodity, a very cheap one too. The cost of API tokens is racing to the bottom because of fierce competition from other companies. Today, OpenAI is trying to sell premium bottled water next to a free water fountain, to participate in the AI race today means you have to be able to burn hundreds of billions, and OpenAI can't do that for much longer.
And without a path to profitability, how is OpenAI going to spend the 1 trillion dollars that they promised to spend? (They don't)
A Bubble Pop Starts With OpenAI
If the AI bubble were to pop, it would start from OpenAI. All the companies participating in the AI race like Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, has extremely profitable businesses and has the infrastructure to allow them to burn billions without much thought, even if the AI bubble pops, the mega cap companies' main businesses are still extremely profitable and it wouldn't affect them that much. But OpenAI is the weak link among the AI participants. AI is the only business OpenAI has, without AI, OpenAI is worth 0, and OpenAI is leveraged to the max with the deals they have and promises to invest in other companies. If OpenAI pops, they will drag the rest of the AI sector down with them.