“We’re going to see a situation where ChatGPT was the early winner,” Porter and Co. equity analyst Ross Hendricks told WaPo. “They’re going to end up just like MySpace did with the inability to truly monetize and break away from the pack.”
In a Thursday note, Deutsche Bank analyst Jim Reid estimated staggering losses for OpenAI amounting to $140 billion between 2024 and 2029.
“OpenAI may continue to attract significant funding and could ultimately develop products that generate substantial profits and revolutionize the world,” he wrote, as quoted by WaPo. “But at present, no start-up in history has operated with expected losses on anything approaching this scale.”
“We are firmly in uncharted territory,” Reid added.
To even just cover the interest on all the money OpenAI is borrowing, the company’s revenues will have to grow immensely. But according to recent Sensor Tower data reviewed by WaPo, ChatGPT’s monthly active users grew by a mere five percent between July and November. Google’s Gemini AI app soared by a far healthier 30 percent over the same period.
Recent data also suggests ChatGPT user growth is stalling out in Europe, highlighting a slowdown that couldn’t come at a worse time for OpenAI.
Google’s latest Gemini 3, in particular, impressed when it was announced released last month, with benchmarks exceeding OpenAI’s most powerful AI models. Its Nano Banana Pro AI image model has also pushed the envelope, while OpenAI’s Sora video-generating app has received comparatively little media attention after a storm of controversy surrounding its rollout.
It’s not just Google, either. OpenAI is also facing steep competition from open-source AI models in China, like the startup DeepSeek, whose extremely energy-efficient R1 model threw Silicon Valley into chaos earlier this year.
OpenAI Is Suddenly in Major Trouble
Netscape' Navigator was first browser to market, but was overtaken by Google, which went public 3 years after Netscape, and by Microsoft. |
