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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> people here were so confident that OpenAI is going to collapse because of how much compute they pre-ordered

That's not why. It was and is because they've been incredibly unfocused and have burnt through cash on ill-advised, expensive things like Sora. By comparison Anthropic have been very focused.

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I don't think that was the main reason for people thinking OpenAI is going to collapse here.

By far, the biggest argument was that OpenAI bet too much on compute.

Being unfocused is generally an easy fix. Just cut things that don't matter as much, which they seem to be doing.

It really wasn't. Most of the argument was around product portfolio and agentic coding performance.

That’s just short term talk. The main thesis behind their collapse is that they won’t be able to pay their compute bills because they won’t have enough demand to.

That doesn't really track because their compute isn't like a debt obligation.

The compute topic was more around how OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, and others were all announcing commitments to spend money in each other in a circular way which could just net out to zero value.

Nobody was talking about them betting too much on compute, people were saying that their shady deals on compute with NVIDIA and Oracle were creating a giant bubble in their attempt to get a Too Big To Fail judgement (in their words- taxpayer-backed "backstop").

To me it seems like they burn so much money they can do lots of things in parallel. My guess would be that e.g. codex and sora are very independently developed. After all there's a quite a hard limit on how many bodies are beneficial to a software project.

They all compete internally over constrained compute resources - for R&D and production.

Personally its down to Altman having the cognitive capacity of a sleeping snail, the world insight of a hormonal 14 year old who's only ever read one series of manga.

Despite having literal experts at his fingertips, he still isn't able to grasp that he's talking unfilters bollocks most of the time. Not to mention is Jason level of "oath breaking"/dishonesty.

Honestly it seems like each major player here fumbles the ball in turn, quite fun to observe. But hey, it's a difficult game.

> By comparison Anthropic have been very focused.

Ah yes, very focused on crapping out every possible thing they can copy and half bake?

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