Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:
Market signals are essential for product development including AI. Over the past two years, OpenAI and their defacto leader, Sam Altman, a man who is developing his own sort of “cult following” in the AI investment world, have been receiving harsh criticism over their financial decline. Open is losing tens of billions every year. Whether Altman likes it or not, the market is already signalling: OpenAI is not providing the value it claims it can…
And that is why Altman is rejecting the feedback of the market, not placing large amounts of investor money into development and problem-solving, but into lobbying the US government, and as a result its Central Bank – the source of funding that will allow Altman to create the utopian world he envisions.
But, if Mr.Market has anything to say about it the future will be different.
OpenAI is rapidly losing money and is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026 alone.
If they can't get another round of funding, OpenAI could run out of money as soon as 2027. pic.twitter.com/bdrq8esHPa
— Pubity (@pubity) January 19, 2026
The non-profit, OpenAI was founded on the premise that it would be an open platform. The open platform and transparent code would protect against the prospect of what they called and “AGI dictatorship.” Basically, an AI that would takeover humanity, rule us, or destroy us, whatever it pleases…
In a fiat-driven world market signals are easily distorted.
Market signals are distorted in three ways:
1. Interest Rates
Interest rates set by Central Banks distort supply and demand of available capital. When interest rates are lower, money is easier to obtain. And when interest rates are higher, money is harder to obtain, which money becomes easier to get, or harder to get…because of supply and demand distortion no one really knows which one it should be. Should money be harder, or easier to get? The market is never honest. This is where boom and bust cycles come from.
2. Price Signals
As the money supply grows, price signals become distorted. Since there is a greater supply of money, assets like houses, land, and gold, for example, require repricing. There’s more money in circulation. So the amount we hand over in currency for a house must also go up because the money is worth less. The thing is, it becomes harder to distinguish between “real” price changes (supply/demand shifts in housing) and the effects of monetary inflation.
3. Time Preference
The last distortion is time preference. Since the money supply is expanding, and the currency is becoming worth less, the fiat system incentivizes spending. It also penalizes saving. The system also encourages consumption. To continue on the housing example, the fiat system forces the average person into buying homes as soon as they can, acquiring mortgages, which then determines their future. No delay in purchasing a home is ever considered. Why delay buying a home, they say, when you can “build equity.” It’s a point-of-view anyone who’s attempted to build a business, or some assets, or system that produces cashflow knows is a distortion of reality. You want to build skills, solve problems, and build systems that grow to solve those problems in real-life.
OpenAI is doing nothing of the sort. It is an open system trying to solve too many problems. That’s how investment in OpenAI is marketed even though it is not helping the poor. It is now moving toward a business model of extraction (I’m talking about advertising), rather than closing the gap between the rich and poor by creating an exceptional product those with money will pay more for, which is what Altman promised only a few years ago. However, since OpenAI is losing tens of billions every year, they’re not able to sustain that promise.
So, what could OpenAI be doing?
They could be doing what Google’s been doing for the past few years.
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, the quiet / loud talk was that it would destroy Google’s search engine supremacy. Just over three years later that is hardly the case. Despite their underdog status in 2022, Google has remained profitable. That’s because Google continues to respond to market signals while they follow the technology curve. As far as search engines go, you may have seen the AI overview at the top of your searches. The top of your search ends up looking like a digital version of an abstract on an academic research paper. You get summary statement, an explanation of keywords / principles, a few explainer videos found on Youtube. That was their first adaptation to market signals in the context of search.
Google’s second response to market signals in search is their development and release of Disco.
Disco is a new test browser from Google that helps you with tricky online tasks. It looks at all the websites you have open and creates special tools to help you get things done faster. For example, if you’re comparing different products or planning a vacation, Disco can organize all that information for you automatically. Instead of switching between tons of tabs and getting confused, it keeps everything in one place and makes browsing much easier.
Google has also released several other products based on market signals.
Here are a few other products solving real-world problems:
Gemini 3 is Google’s flagship AI model family, released in late 2025. It breaks down complex topics with visualizations and interactive simulations, and can process text, images, video, and code simultaneously, which include Nano Banana Pro (I’ve tried this image generator and it’s amazing).
NotebookLM has become one of Google’s breakout hits. It’s a content creation tool capable of generating podcasts, infographics, and videos while relying exclusively on user-provided sources to reduce inaccuracies.
See how it works?
Follow Market Signals, Make a Profit
Companies that respond to genuine market signals and solve real problems will thrive in any environment, fiat or not. Those that chase utopian visions through government funding, rely on Hail Mary funding, and extraction-based models like OpenAI, will struggle. Google didn’t reinvent search overnight or promise to solve every problem humanity faces. Instead, they listened to what users actually needed, which was better information organization, faster task completion, more accurate visual tools. So they built products like Disco, Gemini 3, and NotebookLM accordingly.
OpenAI’s trajectory from open-source nonprofit to lobbying-dependent corporation shows what is more than common in the fiat world. It is the same problem that caused the “dot com” bubble, the Great Financial Crisis, and the Money Bubble… the over-valuation of the US dollar. Founders ignore market feedback and pursue capital instead of customers.
As the AI industry matures, we’ll likely see more companies forced to choose: Will they build genuine value that people willingly pay for, or will they follow Altman’s path, seeking subsidies and advertising revenue while burning through billions? The market has already begun delivering its verdict. Just how much more capital will be destroyed in pursuit of promises that were never grounded in economic reality? We’ll see.
