Truth Decay

What many people forget about the now infamous tech giant OpenAI is that it was initially founded as a nonprofit organisation by a whole bunch of well-known investors, amongst them Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, with the supposed goal of developing AI for the “betterment of humanity”.

The company has since been the beneficiary of nearly 900 billion dollars of investment, secured contracts with the U.S Department of War for use in surveillance and propaganda, and become ubiquitous with generative AI. Bubble or not, it has transformed the global economy in no time, and at the center of it all is none other than Sam Altman, co-founder and current CEO of OpenAI.

Unfortunately for Mr. Altman, he isn’t some kind of prolific AI genius. He just shook the right hands at the right time. Before long, Elon Musk split off to develop his own AI software for Tesla and later xAI, as did Dario and Daniela Amodei, founders of Anthropic. Google and Meta caught up to ChatGPT with their own AI models and a Chinese open-source competitor called DeepSeek turned a whole lot of users off the idea of paying a monthly subscription to use generative AI.

Fast forward a few years, and Sam Altman still has no clear plan for how to make ChatGPT profitable. OpenAI is burning through 38 Million U.S Dollars a day as of early 2026. Their competitors’ services reach similar or even better benchmarks with less of a running cost. Sam himself isn’t exactly popular either, with his 27 Million Dollar home in San Francisco recently being the target of a molotov cocktail attack.

Then there’s Sora, OpenAI’s social media AI video generation app (what a mouthful) that was recently pulled by the company. It had been reported to be costing the company somewhere around 15 Million U.S Dollars per day, just to allow people to generate nonsensical videos and flood the internet with anti-AI sentiment. Sora, unlike ChatGPT, never saw mainstream use and demonstrated just how careless these tech giants are being with the money they receive from investors.

In an investigation recently published by the New York Magazine, a former chief scientist at OpenAI called Sam a “pathological liar” who showed a “consistent pattern of lying” to the company’s board. Something to keep in mind when you next hear him on the news, talking off-handedly to someone who barely understands generative A.I about how we’re just a few months away from AGI being able to cater to your every need.

The solutions to your problems, reader, be they large or small, inconsequential or impactful, are not accesible by a monthly subscription fee. Despite what Peter Thiel’s “chosen one” wants you to believe, generative A.I is a very expensive, very destructive gimmick that in most cases will actively contribute to the enshittification of our modern lives.

One day, we will look back and wonder what humanity ever saw in Mr. Altman. He is neither particularly smart, nor charming, he doesn’t even seem a particularly good person, despite his ramblings about how his technology is going to fix everything. His vision, it seems, is clouded by greed and a complete disconnect from everyday people. A fate far too common for the elite to fall victim to.

I find it somewhat ironic, if not even worrysome, that those spearheading the development of this supposedly “human-like” technology seem completely out of touch with the human experience; greasing their palms as they thrust us into the uncanny valley in an endless dance with ‘chatbots’ and A.I generated media.