The press, for the most part, has done a really poor job conveying just how many unlikely events have to happen in sequence for the current AI boom not to be a bubble. This is especially true when you look at certain companies. If you go through the conditions necessary for OpenAI to meet its present commitments and continue to spend perhaps a trillion dollars over the next three and a half years, the closer you look, the more the bull case feels like a Pick 6 ticket (though, in defense of OpenAI, it still looks more credible than the valuation for SpaceX).
Case in point, OpenAI has assured everyone that it will go from losing somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion a year to becoming enormously profitable by the end of 2030. One of the assumptions behind that promise is that ad revenue will be enormously profitable for the company. While that is possible, the actual numbers are not encouraging.
Joe Wilkins writing for [Futurism](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-ad-revenue-ai-advertising-financial-projection):
Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream
[talking point]on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker. Case in point, OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone — even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.That massive gulf was observed in a
[new analysis]from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, first[flagged by], which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90 percent. In fact, Emarketer’s take is even more devastating than that: it estimates the entire addressable market for chatbot advertising — the maximum amount of money up for grabs overall — at $5.4 billion.AdWeek
(Have we mentioned how screwed Oracle and Softbank would be if OpenAI implodes?)