Marcus on AI

The opening stages of OpenAI’s unraveling, which I first warned about in January 2024 (if not before), have begun.

To begin with, hardly anyone trusts them anymore, which can’t be great for business.

Take the reaction to OpenAIs Sam Altman’s latest announcement, on Tuesday August 18 (i.e., “earlier today” for those of us on the West Coast), that OpenAI would be pausing, ostensibly for safety reasoning:

X avatar for @sama Sam Altman@samaWe have paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us. Model progress is now extremely rapid, and we always said we would take action if we felt that model6:53 PM · Aug 18, 2026 · 173K Views 352 Replies · 108 Reposts · 1.48K Likes

As far as I can tell, hardly anyone believed him.

X avatar for @justalexoki taoki@justalexokithere's no way this is the real reason right X avatar for @sama Sam Altman @samaWe have paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us. Model progress is now extremely rapid, and we always said we would take action if we felt that model7:44 PM · Aug 18, 2026 · 60K Views 52 Replies · 5 Reposts · 616 Likes

The best one line translation came from the user @NIK on X:

Slightly elaborated:

X avatar for @Ross__Hendricks Ross Hendricks@Ross\\_HendricksTranslation: we need to immediately stop torching cash to provide some semblance of a sustainable business model so we can rush this IPO out the door before the bubble pops RIP “compute shortage/AI bottleneck” brosSam Altman @samaWe have paused some frontier RL training to ensure that we can meet the appropriate alignment, security and monitoring standards for the new level of capabilities in front of us. Model progress is now extremely rapid, and we always said we would take action if we felt that model7:50 PM · Aug 18, 2026 · 13.3K Views 6 Replies · 38 Reposts · 326 Likes

And, here’s where things get worse. It turns out people were very likely right to be skeptical, because The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin and Corrie Dribusch just dropped big news:

Berber Jin@berber\_jin1openai has been tossing out a lot of vague ARR numbers, so we decided to take a deeper look. the company grew revenue by just 18% to $6.7 billion from q1 to q2, while its losses sank further into the red not a great sign ahead of an IPO w/ @cdriebusch via @WSJ 10:37 PM · Aug 18, 2026 · 220K Views 35 Replies · 83 Reposts · 583 Likes

and then an hour and half later, Jin dropped still further details, also bad for OpenAI:

Berber Jin@berber\_jin1@cdriebusch @WSJ story is now updated with additional details. openai's losses grew by $3 billion from q1 to q2, to $12.3 billion not a great look given that it added only $1 billion in revenue in the meantime, to $6.7 billion11:54 PM · Aug 18, 2026 · 58.6K Views 2 Replies · 9 Reposts · 116 Likes

You don’t want your quarterly losses to quadruple right before your IPO.

It’s safe to say all this is good news for Anthropic:

[](https://x.com/wsj/status/2089847841950749178?s=61)

The Wall Street Journal@WSJ