How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

Isn't paying a company to dig a hole who then pays you the same amount to fill said hole illegal?

Even worse in VAT countries where such carousels make you eligible for a tax return on technically zero added value

Not if it increases the GDP.

Seems like a net loss due to transactional costs.

In a fair and just system with appropriate oversight, yes. So in this instance, no.

The increase in value of the companies outweighs the transactional costs and then you borrow against the value of the company and make new circular deals. It works really well for a very long time and then at some point it doesn’t. The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end.

They are banking on:

* stock prices increasing more than the non-existent money being burnt

* they are now too big to fail - turn on the real money printers and feed it directly into their bank accounts so the Chinese/Russians/Iranians/Boogeymen don't kill us all

Well, I've got great news then 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was hole filling companies paying hole digging companies to dig holes and in-kind pay them to fill them up again

what could possibly go wrong

> The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end.

This is bad. We should not shrug our shoulders and go "Oh ho, this is how the game is played" as though we can substitute cynicism for wisdom. We should say "this is bad, this is a moral hazard, and we should imprison and impoverish those who keep trying it".

Or we'll get more.

Only if you defraud investors in hole-digging corp and hole-filling corp by that by doing this you will be able to extract Unobtanium, which will make both companies 1000x profitable.

Yes, but what does that have to do with this situation? The hole served no purpose. The companies are using the GPUs.

99% of code I generated using genAI served no purpose at the end of the day

This is just starting to sound more and more like "we're almost at AGI I promise bro just need one more round of investment bro please just one trillion more dollars please bro".

Ok. Maybe use it better? Or don't use it at all. Doesn't mean it's not being used to some end, unlike a hole.

Keep in mind also that the models are going to continue improving, if only on cost. Just a significant cost reduction allows for more "thinking" mode use.

Most of the reports about how useless LLMs are were from older models being used by people that don't know how to use LLMs. I'm not someone that thinks they're perfect or even great yet, but their not dirt.

They might be using the GPUs, but is that use providing real value? You can run a while loop and max out any processor.

And, well, nobody knows if it is providing real value. We know it's doing something and has some value WE attached to it. We don't know what the real value is, we're just speculating.

I suppose we could use a few pennies to hire some security guards to protect the filled holes.

Now we’re creating jobs!