OpenAI reduced its compute target from $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments to $600 billion of spending by 2030, which CNBC describes as resetting expectations. More revealingly, the company expects revenue to rise from $13.1 billion in 2025 to more than $280 billion in 2030. At this scale, “lower expectations” does not mean plausible. It means less cosmological.
AI can be genuinely useful without making any of these projections sane. A good technology can still be a bad capital structure; utopia and bankruptcy are not the only possible outcomes.