In a conversation with Big Technology Podcast host Alex Kantrowitz, Mark Cuban did not hold back when the topic turned to OpenAI, its spending, its leadership, and its chances of delivering returns for investors.
When Kantrowitz raised the subject of OpenAI’s recent $110 billion raise and plans to spend more than a trillion dollars on infrastructure, Cuban was blunt about what he believes investors will get back.
“They’ll never get it,” Cuban said. “They’re just throwing away that money. I mean, at scale, right? It’s not that AI is not going to work, but look at Apple. They haven’t spent next to anything, but they’ve got a foundation where they can just plug and play into their devices.”
Cuban pointed to the uncertainty of who wins the foundational model race as the core problem. “We don’t know if the business of foundational models, the ChatGPTs, Geminis, Grok, Claude, etc., is going to be like the strea ming industry where there’s one leader and a bunch of players that make money, or like search where there’s effectively one company,” he said. “So they need to raise all the money, go all in, and spend everything they can, kiss all the rings they need to kiss around the world, in hopes of being the one.”
His assessment of OpenAI’s vertical strategy was equally skeptical. “I always call healthcare for OpenAI a feature. It’s not a product,” Cuban said. “It’s a feature that open evidence has, that others can add just by going spending money on the IP.”
On Sam Altman specifically, Cuban drew a sharp contrast with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. “Sam is all over the map and I think that’ll backfire on him,” he said. “They were buying up 40% of this company’s memory chips and they just backed out of that. You can’t do that. At some point people stop trusting and stop wanting to do business. They just moved him from their safety committee, I think, to something else.”
Asked what advice he would give, Cuban acknowledged Altman doesn’t need it, but noted a pattern in how both OpenAI and Anthropic communicate publicly. “I just don’t see how either one of them communicating is beneficial for anything but raising money,” he said.
Cuban’s stated what he sees as the endgame for companies that go all-in without a clear niche. “You’re just a website. You’re just an app,” he said. “And you just spent a trillion dollars to be an app.”
He did leave room for a narrow path forward, noting that the field may ultimately support a few winners. “If you have three, four winners, maybe that works. Maybe three. Any more than that, it’s going to be difficult.”
