The downfall of OpenAI and who will follow
OpenAI's pursuit of leadership through aggressive innovation and overpromising has led to setbacks, including delayed product releases and flawed models. The article suggests that OpenAI's focus on hype over sustainability may lead to its downfall, taking down similar startups that follow its path. In contrast, companies built to endure crises, rather than chase first-mover status, are more likely to survive long-term.
- ▪Sora, OpenAI's video generation model, was announced in February 2024 but not released until December 2024, after competitors had already launched similar models.
- ▪The article claims that Sora demonstrated unrealistic physics and limited understanding of real-world dynamics, undermining OpenAI's claims of breakthrough capabilities.
- ▪OpenAI has made numerous high-profile announcements, including AI browsers, shopping platforms, and hardware, often emphasizing AGI ambitions without delivering on core promises.
- ▪Companies like Perplexity, Midjourney, LangChain, and Cursor are analyzed as either built to survive or overly dependent on OpenAI's trajectory.
- ▪The author argues that long-term survival in business is more important than being first, citing a century-old German corporation as an example of resilience over innovation.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Downfall of OpenAI And Who Will FollowSora dead. GPT-5 flopped. Nvidia walked back. Many top AI startups will fail.Maria SukharevaApr 02, 2026∙ Paid4714ShareA few years ago, I was flying to a conference and next to me sat an older gentleman who happened to work for 40+ years in a traditional German corporation. He was flying to Indonesia, to one of the offices of that corporation, to do a training for the countries C-level management. Apparently, that is what he is doing in his last years before retirement. He told me one of the advice about building a business that stayed with me for good. That is approximately what he said.“Do you know why my company survived over a century? Longer than empires, entire countries, and many other companies that were much more famous.
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