Update on my bet that OpenAI has a 50/50 chance of running out of money by next summer. I know I may be wrong here— this is what 50/50 means. But here’s how I see it. The positive: OpenAI has overtaken Anthropic in terms of weekly revenue, according to OpenRouter data from July. Reflects OpenAI’s scientific excellence, which has always stood in contrast to its shaky business foundations. Impressive that @sama and @gdb have lost loads of senior scientists and yet they still replenish the brain trust. Not so positive: Anthropic appears to enjoy far more customer loyalty. Twelve month retention rates are almost double OAI’s. (H/T @FT). But, tbf, this may just reflect a period when Anthropic’s models improved faster, and maybe the tables have turned. The chief OAI worry is the same as it always was: cash burn. Latest numbers indicate that OAI expects to lose $280 billion by 2030, even though revenue is forecast to 10x between now and then. That implies a massive fund-raising challenge. OAI is running an experiment not only in an unprecedented technology; it is also testing the depth of global capital markets. OAI has used the recent hacking scares to postpone its IPO, which might have been hard to pull off anyway. So it has to raise money privately. Already, the last fund-raising round included a bunch of financial engineering—conditional future cash promises, promises of compute in lieu of cash. OAI has also tried to finance data centers by leaning on Nvidia in its guise as the central bank of AI. See the $105 billion NVidia guarantee on the Ohio data center. How many more nimble financial tricks can OAI pull? Especially in a climate where the political backlash against AI is growing and open weight competition is intense? Here’s what to watch for. OAI financial partner, SoftBank, is plotting the near-term IPO of its data-center builder SB Energy. If that plan runs into trouble, there will be knock-on effects for SoftBank and hence a hit to SoftBank’s ability to pour fresh money into OAI.