Three years ago, OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world and sparked a frenzy unlike anything the technology industry had seen in a long time. We all watched as a relatively unknown lab became the fastest-growing consumer product in history. But the story being written today sounds completely different.
ChatGPT's market share among daily mobile app users in the US fell from 69% to 45% in just one year. Google's Gemini jumped from 15% to 25%, while Elon Musk's Grok rose from just 1.6% to 15%. Data from analytics firm Apptopia is clear: the race has tightened dramatically. ChatGPT is still growing in absolute numbers, but the pace at which its rivals are catching up should be keeping Sam Altman awake at night.
Money Is Going Out Faster Than It Is Coming In
And now for the unpleasant part. OpenAI reported a net loss of more than $13 billion in the first half of 2025. In just one year. Projections for 2026 are even bleaker: losses are expected to reach $14 billion, while total spending will exceed $22 billion. Revenue, meanwhile, amounted to roughly $13 billion. Simply put, OpenAI spends $1.69 for every dollar it earns.
Analysts at HSBC ran the numbers, and the result is sobering: the company will probably not be profitable even in 2030, and by then it will need another $207 billion in additional funding. OpenAI plans to spend a total of $600 billion on computing capacity alone by 2030.
Former Fidelity fund manager George Noble put it bluntly on social media: "OpenAI is falling apart in real time. I've watched companies implode for decades. This one has all the warning signs." Noble pointed out that the company is burning $15 million a day just to operate its Sora video generator, while total quarterly losses have reached $12 billion. His advice to investors was simple: stay away from OpenAI.
DeepSeek Shook the Foundations
Then January 2025 arrived, and Chinese lab DeepSeek unveiled its R1 model to the world. It was comparable to OpenAI's flagship models, but training it cost just $6 million, compared with more than $100 million that OpenAI invested in a comparable generation. The market reacted immediately: Nvidia lost more than $600 billion in market value in a single day.
For OpenAI, it was a rude awakening. The entire logic of "whoever spends the most wins" suddenly began to crumble. If Chinese competitors can achieve comparable results at a fraction of the cost, then enormous investments in infrastructure provide no lasting advantage.
Analyst Benedict Evans summed it up precisely: OpenAI has neither unique technology nor a unique product. Every few weeks, the leading models leapfrog one another, but no company has yet found a way to build a lasting lead that others cannot close. There is no network effect like the ones enjoyed by Windows or Google. A chatbot is simply a window with a text box and an output, and how different from one another can they really be?
Users Are Voting with Their Feet
Market share figures are one thing. But then there is the #QuitGPT movement, which is going viral and has attracted more than 700,000 users considering leaving ChatGPT. People are moving to Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and open-source alternatives. Some are reacting to pricing policies, some to privacy concerns, and some are simply trying out what the competition has to offer.
Evans points to an even deeper problem: 80% of ChatGPT users sent fewer than 1,000 messages throughout all of 2025. That averages fewer than three queries a day. A product that was supposed to change the way we work and think is used by most people only a few times a week. OpenAI itself talks about a "capability gap" between what the models can do and what people actually do with them. Which is an elegant way of saying that the product has not yet found a firm place in everyday life.
What Now, Altman?
OpenAI is responding on every front at once. It is adding ads to ChatGPT to cover the cost of free users. It is preparing its own browser. It is building a platform for developers. It is planning an IPO at a valuation of more than one trillion dollars. And, of course, it continues to invest massively in infrastructure: its commitments to Microsoft Azure alone amount to $250 billion over six years.
But as Evans aptly notes, Sam Altman is trying to exchange "paper wealth" for real strategic positions before the music stops. The question is whether he has enough time left. OpenAI is the story of a company that thought it had won the race and is now discovering that it is only just beginning. And this time, it faces rivals that are faster, cheaper, and backed by entire empires with billions of users.
Sources: cnbc.com and futurism.com
