This week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar took to the internet to make a bold pitch for the company’s future, which she claims is bright, despite what the current numbers say.

If you buy her logic, you must believe some things to be true, regardless of the poorly connected thread of logic that appears to hold them together. In what we can only assume is a pitch to soften up the market for more investment and possibly an IPO, Friar argues that one of the things people should believe about OpenAI is that the more money it spends, the more money it makes.

Running through the AI poster child’s achievements over the last couple of years, Friar said that the business’s compute grew 9.5x from 2023 to 2025 from 0.2 GW to around 1.9 GW. Meanwhile, “revenue followed the same curve” by growing 10x in the same period from $2 billion to more than $20 billion in 2025.

“We firmly believe that more compute in these periods would have led to faster customer adoption and monetization,” she said.

The more you spend, the more you make. It can be true, of course, but it doesn’t always follow.

What OpenAI needs is for people to go from using its AI tools the way they use them now to using them more in the future.

Rest assured that is on the to-do list for 2026. “The priority is closing the gap between what AI now makes possible and how people, companies, and countries are using it day to day. The opportunity is large and immediate, especially in health, science, and enterprise, where better intelligence translates directly into better outcomes,” she said.

The American aphorism “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” springs to mind.

Nonetheless, Friar sees monetization naturally following the kind of investment in computing power necessary to stress the electricity resources of the world’s largest economy.

“As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path,” she asserts.

So, we have the old “something will emerge” argument, which is guaranteed to win over any bank manager who is asked for an unsecured loan for magic beans.

Speaking of banks, HSBC last year glanced at OpenAI’s plans to balance the books and was not entirely convinced that everything added up. It predicted OpenAI’s ChatGPT consumer products would attract 3 billion regular users by 2030, up from 800 million last year, increase subscription rates (10 percent versus 8 percent), and increase corporate demand for APIs and licensing, plus a larger share of digital advertising revenue for AI companies.

Nonetheless, OpenAI “would need $207 billion of new financing by 2030,” the bank said.

Separate analysis underscores how much would need to change to make the LLM builder viable: right now, 95 percent of the 800 million people using ChatGPT, which generates roughly 70 percent of the company’s recurring revenue, aren’t paying.

Out of the mix of paying customers and potential business models, OpenAI is clearly hoping something will emerge.

So do we, and that is not just El Reg’s famous sense of goodwill and generosity toward the tech industry talking.

Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, AMD, CoreWeave, xAI, and a few others are all signed up to mutually dependent deals, some of which involve exchanges of stock.

How this might unravel is yet unclear.

Some commentators have noted the importance to the world as a whole. Financial Times contributing editor Ruchir Sharma pointed out last year that AI accounted for 40 percent of US GDP growth and 80 percent of the gains in US stocks in 2025.

More recently, the IMF predicted US growth would strongly outpace the rest of the G7 this year, forecasting an expansion of 2.4 percent in 2026 and 2 percent in 2027. Tech investment had surged to its highest share of US economic output since 2001, helping drive growth, the IMF found.

However, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, IMF chief economist, said there were “reasons to be somewhat concerned” about the “risk of a market correction, if expectations about AI gains in productivity and profitability are not realized.”

Tiptoeing the fine line between wishful thinking and begging, Friar’s missive reminds us how important OpenAI’s plans might be to us all.

Six years ago, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told the world that AI would be as profound, in terms of human evolution, as the harnessing of fire. One thing is for sure – the industry certainly has a big enough flame to make sure the world’s economy burns down. ®