The lack of self-awareness in some experienced senior execs (who should know better) continues to stun me. Even if I suspected that sentiment about the importance of the job I was doing might be correct, I'd never say it - especially in an on-the-record media interview. Two reasons: 1. Any statement like that has a high probability of coming across very poorly, 2. It's a proposition that can only be judged in retrospect by people external to the context.
Frankly, I think the odds are at least 50/50 that Open AI will someday be considered the Pets.com (or even Enron) of early AI.
Very unlikely.
Pets.com never produced anything of note. OpenAI was the leader in AI for 3 years. Maybe now Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 are slightly ahead, but that's a bit subjective. For all practical purposes OpenAI is in a 3-way tie with Google and Anthropic.
Google would love to sink them and Anthropic, and remain the monopoly in the AI space, like they are in the search space.
But Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, and a few others, would be much less happy with a monopolistic Google, and they'll do their best to help OpenAI and Anthropic stay afloat (as long as it does not cost their business to much to do so).
As for Enron, I don't think another Enron is likely to happen, not at this level of visibility. People simply don't like going to prison. Could one person try to fudge some numbers? Maybe. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind. But Theranos did not have 800 million active users, did not have every analyst in the world scrutinizing them. At the level of OpenAI, you would need many people to be in a conspiracy to fudge numbers, and when there's many people, there's many possibilities for someone to blow the whistle.
I use a Firefox add-on to Bypass Paywalls.
