OpenAI is losing its mind.

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

Welcome back! Lots to talk about this week, from OpenAI’s latest controversy, an AI Scientist that can work for 12 hours straight and advanced research by six months (allegedly), a Chinese SOTA model that might have definitely closed the gap with the US (even more so than DeepSeek), Google’s Siri deal, the insane numbers Morgan Stanley believes Hyperscalers will spend, and more.

Enjoy!

OPENAI

OpenAI Wants Government Safety Net

In an interview with the WSJ, Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, publicly asked for a federal backstop for OpenAI to guarantee a safer, lower-risk way of guaranteeing AI infrastructure and chip buildouts; a free bailout card basically.

In the short clip, she makes the case for it, saying that these buildouts have become too risky for banks (duh), especially considering the underlying asset, the accelerators, depreciate pretty fast (the official lifecycle for a GPU is three years, although prior generations like Ampere are still running 5 years since release), making lenders skeptical of committing too much money.

Therefore, she requests a federal backstop guarantee from the US Government, meaning the government would provide liquidity to banks in the event they need it, to ensure the buildout is executed.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

Unbelievably wild take, but not surprising at all. This is what we’ve been saying for weeks now: OpenAI is making itself too large to fail.

Although she has backtracked on the claim (and so has Sam), it’s clear she meant it, which suggests OpenAI is running into newfound struggles to finance its overly ambitious $1.4 trillion buildout plan. Nothing we didn’t already know (NVIDIA’s $100 billion “loan” was all we needed to know), but I was surprised to see them taking this stance publicly so soon.

I’m speculating here, but these comments and Sam Altman’s recent stressed and defensive interview in the B2G podcast with Brad (OpenAI investor by the way) signal to me that things aren’t going perfectly at all.

Additionally, the fact that they are losing an astronomical amount of money per quarter is surely not helping.

And in case you’re wondering, this differs from the US government’s $10 billion stake in Intel. One thing is to provide liquidity to a company that’s clearly the US’s only way of getting a chip foundry champion (an obvious national security interest and even potentially generating revenues for US tax payers in the future); another is to tell the financial institutions in America not to say no to OpenAI because they’ll bail out the company to the tune of a potential $1.4 trillion debt.

It’s already challenging enough to justify the government investing in a private company, but another story is effectively privatizing the profits while socializing the losses.

It’s not up to the US taxpayer to pay for OpenAI’s struggles, so let’s hope the Trump Administration does not fall for that, especially when the taxpayer won’t be receiving profits if OpenAI succeeds.

DATA CENTERS

A New Way to Visualize the AI Build Out

EpochAI has released, free…

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