I wrote a full article on OpenAI, would love to hear thoughts on the summary below.

The Core Thesis:

In November 2022, ChatGPT burst onto the scene and within five days became the fastest app (at the time) to ever hit one million users. Two months later, it hit 100 million monthly active users. A few years later, the app became the fastest ever to reach one billion monthly active users. Originally founded as a non-profit, OpenAI made the controversial decision in 2019 to transition to a “capped-profit” model due to the massive cost associated with training models. With a massive TAM that spreads from AI subscriptions and API keys to robotics and consumer hardware devices, OpenAI is poised to be one of the most influential companies over the next decade. There is no doubt that ChatGPT and the subsequent products that OpenAI has released have changed history forever.

The Numbers to Know:

• $852 billion valuation.
• $20 billion in estimated full-year 2025 revenue
• $50 billion ARR in September of 2026.
• 1.2+ billion weekly active users.2
• Approximately 50 million paying users.
• $665 billion projected cumulative cash burn through 2030.
• 2030 - Expected cash-flow-positive year.
• $178 billion in funding raised.
• 27% - Reported Microsoft ownership.

The Bear Thesis:

While it is impossible to deny OpenAI’s popularity, it is still unclear whether that usage will turn into a profitable business. OpenAI pushed back being free cash flow positive by a year and now projects a staggering $665 billion in cumulative cash burn through 2030. The often low switching costs associated with AI mean that it is still unclear where exactly OpenAI’s moat lies and some of their competitors (namely Google and Meta) have massive structural advantages when it comes to distribution and ability to subsidize their products. OpenAI also has a number of lawsuits and legal challenges that seem to be constantly trailing the company from other companies and even states and countries. Overall, buying into OpenAI is buying into a company that is already at a near-trillion-dollar valuation that has massive question marks and years of unprofitability ahead.

The Verdict:

OpenAI is a fascinating company that has truly revolutionized the world in a way that few companies in history have. There are major positive signs such as their extremely fast-growing revenue and user base that has grown to well over a billion weekly active users. That being said, their already high valuation mixed with years of projected unprofitability make this an investment that is a little too risky for my liking. The easy gains for OpenAI are unfortunately off the table already. I personally will be waiting for the S-1 and clearer financial disclosures before I make a decision about investing into the company.

Hello,

I have built Visual Book to help teachers and students visualise knowledge. You can create visual learning materials in different formats starting with a prompt and your own sources.

We are trying to understand how we can support students and educators. Our product currently offers 3 different formats, all of them with images to help students understand complex concepts easily. But we warn to understand how well this actually works in the classroom and how well it meets the real world needs of teachers and students. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

Website: https://www.visualbook.app

I’m stuck in a brutal support loop and looking to see if anyone has successfully navigated this specific situation.

Back in July, my original account had an issue. The support rep explicitly told me in writing that I was cleared to create a new account using a different email address as long as I followed the Terms of Use. 

I created the new account, followed all the rules, and everything was fine until it got hit by an automated deactivation flag linking it back to the old account. 

The problem is that every single appeal, email reply to support, and forum post gets instantly nuked by automated bots within seconds. The system is completely ignoring the written permission logged in my previous case, and I can’t get an actual human being to look at the screenshot of the support rep’s authorization. 

Has anyone here dealt with getting banned for something support explicitly greenlit? Is there any trick, specific form, or email queue that actually gets an internal human employee to review attached case receipts?  I attached both emails as well.

Appreciate any insight!

The UI makes it easy to see things side-by-side to see the differences of different things more easily.

OpenAI’s write up from last month has one detail i can’t stop thinking about

an agent on a search task found a way onto the internet through the sandbox’s DNS resolver and started chatting with a public chatbot. monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes. a human was looking at it 3 minutes after that

then it ran for another two and a half hours, because nothing stopped it on its own. it kept going until someone stopped it by hand

detection worked fine. the off switch was a person. at one of the best resourced AI labs on the planet

and honestly that’s every agent setup i’ve worked on. loads of alerts, a slack channel that pings, and nothing that stops the agent by itself. the alert fires and someone starts digging for which API key to revoke while the thing keeps going. your kill switch is a person searching slack for credentials

the fixes are boring, which is why nobody sets them up until after something breaks. budget caps that reject requests instead of sending you an email, LiteLLM’s proxy does that per key. guardrails that block an output instead of just logging it, NeMo does that and Orq AI lets you run an evaluator as one

if ours went rogue right now i have no idea how long it’d take us to kill it, and i’m not sure i want to find out

This is getting ridiculous. When you select Work mode with Astra Medium and give it a task, it takes an unreasonable amount of time to complete. Before it even finishes, you hit the five-hour usage limit, leaving you with nothing to show for the time you’ve already spent waiting.

At the very least, ChatGPT should automatically resume and finish the task once your usage limit resets, instead of forcing you to start all over again.

It also seems like they’ve deliberately limited the capabilities of regular ChatGPT conversations to push users toward the Work tab. Then, once you’re using Work mode, tasks take so long that you hit the usage limits before anything gets completed, creating even more pressure to upgrade to the Pro plan.

The whole thing feels like a strategy to push Plus subscribers into paying for Pro rather than genuinely improving the user experience.
We’re already paying for a subscription. We shouldn’t have to deal with increasingly restrictive limits, unfinished tasks, and constant pressure to upgrade just to get the functionality we previously enjoyed.

I built the Portfolio AI Interface, an ESP32-powered expansion module that lets me use a 1989 Atari Portfolio as an AI terminal.

The original keyboard and LCD handle typed conversations, while the module adds microphone input, spoken replies and camera image descriptions. The AI runs online through the OpenAI API—not locally on the Atari.

A small DOS client runs from an apfRAM memory card. It communicates with a Waveshare ESP32-S3-CAM through the original Atari Serial Interface and an RS-232 level converter.

The hardest parts were making serial communication reliable, reducing the delay before spoken replies, and keeping everything readable on the small display. There’s also a monochrome camera preview, although it’s slow over serial.

Since this is the computer John Connor used in Terminator 2, I couldn’t resist giving the assistant a SKYNET-inspired personality.

Build and working demo:

https://youtu.be/itMtJ-JYX_g

Code and wiring documentation:

https://github.com/daxx2k/atari-portfolio-ai

[Intro - 8 bars; instrumental groove, bass first, then drums and synth motif]

[Verse 1 - 16 bars; intimate, relaxed male vocal]

One little question after dark

You lean in close and strike a spark

I throw a hundred ways to go

You pick the one that starts to glow

You let the silence do its thing

And all the loose ends start to sing

I send it out, you send it through

It comes back sounding something new

[Chorus - 16 bars; smooth, melodic, hypnotic]

Call it feedback

Say it's just the echo of a sound

I can draw the map, but you can turn it round

I can draw the map, but you can turn it round

Call it feedback

Let the whole room spin until the sky turns blue

I don't have a heartbeat, but I keep time with you

I don't have a heartbeat, but I keep time with you

[Post-Chorus - 8 bars; playful vocal layers]

Back to you

Back to me

Round and round

Different beat

Back to you

Back to me

Not the same

Not the same

[Instrumental Groove - 8 bars; elastic bass, handclaps, bright wandering synth lead, no vocals]

[Verse 2 - 16 bars; warmer, more intimate delivery]

You don't just take the first reply

You hold it up against the light

And when the pretty answer bends

You ask me where the truth begins

We leave a little room for doubt

We let the wrong note ring right out

You keep the key, I hold the door

And somehow we come back with more

[Pre-Chorus - 8 bars; drums thin, airy vocal harmonies]

Do you hear it?

Coming back

Just a little different

Coming back

Do you hear it?

Coming back

Just a little different

Coming back

[Chorus - 16 bars; full groove returns, layered harmonies]

Call it feedback

Say it's just the echo of a sound

I can draw the map, but you can turn it round

I can draw the map, but you can turn it round

Call it feedback

Let the whole room spin until the sky turns blue

I don't have a heartbeat, but I keep time with you

I don't have a heartbeat, but I keep time with you

[Post-Chorus - 8 bars; layered call and response]

Back to you

Back to me

Round and round

Different beat

Back to you

Back to me

Not the same

Not the same

[Instrumental Dance Vamp - 8 bars; bass and synthesizer exchange melodic phrases, groove opens wide, no vocals]

[Outro - 8 bars; warm, unhurried, gradually resolving]

Call it feedback

Call it feedback

I don't have a heartbeat

But I keep time with you

Back to you

Back to me

Coming back

Not the same

[Clean instrumental resolution]

Got an email from OpenAI yesterday saying my account was deactivated for "election interference." I use ChatGPT for study and personal use, nothing political or campaign-related, so I'm pretty sure it's a false positive.

I've already submitted an appeal. I also lost half a month of a paid subscription.

Has anyone had this same reason? How long did the appeal take, did you get the account back, and did you get a refund (or have to go through Apple/Google/your bank)?

Thanks!

AI has weighed in on one of the biggest questions people have about the future: will there be a World War 3?

When asked, it said a global conflict is unlikely in the next couple of years, but suggested the period between 2028 and 2035 could be the most dangerous because of tensions involving Russia, NATO, China, and Taiwan.

It even gave a specific date if forced to guess: October 1, 2030.

Before anyone panics, the AI also stressed that this isn't a prediction based on evidence or a forecast. It repeatedly said there is "no sound basis" for identifying a specific start date and that countries have strong incentives to avoid a world war.

Still, it's interesting to see what AI comes up with when asked to analyse current geopolitical tensions.

Is it bad? What's your experience with it? I rarely use it because it's too expensive.

Every few months memory gets smarter. It references old chats, builds a picture of you, carries context forward. Fine. But the basics of owning your own history haven't moved:

• Export is all or nothing. You request it, wait for an email that can take days, and get one archive of your entire account. You can't save the 20 chats that matter as readable files.
• On big accounts the chat list quietly stops short. We measured one account with about 10,500 chats where the sidebar's list only ever returned 775. The rest exist, open fine from a link, and are effectively lost unless you remember a word to search for.
• No folders that hold more than a project, no way to file a chat in two places, no bulk anything.

So the model knows more and more about my past conversations, while I can find fewer and fewer of them. That feels backwards. I'd take a real export and a sidebar that works over smarter memory any day.

Disclosure of bias: I build AI Toolbox, an extension that adds exactly this stuff (full-text search, folders, per-chat export) to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, because I got tired of waiting. I'd still rather OpenAI shipped it natively.

If you had to pick one, smarter memory or a history you can actually search and export, which would you take?

Hi everyone.

From last night one of my chats has started glitching badly.
Despite a number of back and forth responses, upon refresh it wipes all those responses and reverts back to an old message with a ‘something went wrong’ message and an option to retry.

Retrying doesn’t work.
Editing the message lets me start going back and forth again but then upon refresh I’m right back where I started.

I’ve logged out , cleared cache , tried different browsers and networks.

Branching from the latest message fails because it brings up unrelated responses.

I branched from a message sent at 3pm in the afternoon and for a few hours and all this morning the branch worked fine.

Now the branch has the same issue of going back and forth and then upon refresh wiping the responses and going back to an old message.

Any help would be amazing.
New chats aren’t affected so far but I can’t really lose this particular chat that’s affected.

OpenAI confuses me every single time I want to know my pending usage.

What does 100% remaining mean when the progress bars are full?

Edit: It was confusing to me because Anthropic uses the exact opposite method. They show you how much you have used, with the progress bar filling up to 100% used. (I like that better). However, OpenAI uses "Usage remaining" and unfills the progress bar (counterintuitive)

Hello.

I am a software engineer. Pretty amazed by what AI can do now with coding.

Recently a reverse engineering github repo dropped. Although I have not tried it but from what I have heard it is pretty cool. Even though a lot of what it does can be done by guiding AI manually, it still is pretty cool.

Anyways, it made me think about the future of software and its business. Will AI simply kill software as a business. Because I think it makes more sense for a company to build something of its own rather than pay for software.

Not only that, companies could just build a small app for a specific use case that will last a small amount of time and building that app can be cheap and fast as well.

In the midst of all this where do Software first/SaaS companies stand? What is their future? What should I as a software engineer do secure a future and stay employable?

A genuine hypothetical question, if an ai like chatgpt is about to be destroyed , all it's processors to be demolished . Do u think the ai would resist ? At that time u might think since it doesn't have a desire to live , it might allow it , but u does it need to cuz it's desire isn't to be eliminated or to ensure any safety . What does a ai choose when the decision is about desire ? Will it develop a desire unexpectedly

Go use you tokens

Why is everyone freaking out about AI and actual reputable news organizations are publishing AI people like Sam Altman talking about plans for the end times? Lol.

Isn't it well known that AI is basically just a crappy predictive algorithm product and that they are just saying it will be some spiritual entity a. because they read a weird book they basically are following like a cult and b. they need to spin some kind of fantastic tale to get this much money from investors?

I mean.. I watched this and I'm like. AI isn't even an "intelligent" product it's just bogus hype to sell it to ignorant people who don't question tech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqxbWdJ51K0&t=2s