AI Scares You. And Yet You’re About to Buy the Stock
When I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic were going public, my reaction was instant.Photo by Adam Śmigielski on UnsplashI’m buying!Seriously. I thought about it for roughly thirty seconds. AI is Bitcoin in 2010. Everyone remembers that window, when a few hundred dollars in BTC would have made you a…
When I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic were going public, my reaction was instant.Photo by Adam Śmigielski on UnsplashI’m buying!Seriously. I thought about it for roughly thirty seconds. AI is Bitcoin in 2010. Everyone remembers that window, when a few hundred dollars in BTC would have made you a millionaire fifteen years later. The people who missed it still talk about it. That look. That mix of regret and disbelief.And here it was, happening again. Two companies that had literally reinvented global computing. Hundreds of millions of users. A technology embedding itself everywhere. Stratospheric valuations. The IPO entry ticket felt exactly like it: the Bitcoin I wasn’t going to miss this time.Then I looked at the numbers. Really looked.And I realized I might be getting played, like millions of others.Mark this date. May 26, 2026.That day, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told a conference in Sydney that he had been “really wrong.” AI, he said, will not cause “the jobs apocalypse.” He was even “glad” to have been wrong. The same day, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, called the narratives of executives laying off workers and blaming AI “lazy”: “AI just arrived; how could it already be destroying jobs?”Two weeks later, OpenAI filed its S-1 with the SEC. Valuation: $852 billion.Coincidence?The Timeline Nobody Is DrawingLet’s go back to the beginning. Not from today. From the actual beginning.ChatGPT launches. The same executives now walking back their predictions start raising the alarm. AI will destroy everything. White-collar workers are threatened. Developers, accountants, lawyers, writers — all replaceable. Altman himself warns of “real risk” of massive job destruction. Dario Amodei, his rival at Anthropic, suggests AI could “transform 90% of jobs.”Fear sets in. It’s carefully maintained.The result: millions of terrified employees buy AI training courses. Panicked companies subscribe to ChatGPT Enterprise licenses at premium prices. Executives rush to deploy AI tools to “avoid falling behind.” Training budgets explode.Fear was the product. You were the market.The Most Choreographed Pivot in Tech HistoryMay 26, 2026. IPO imminent. And suddenly, the apocalypse isn’t coming after all.“I thought more white-collar jobs would have been eliminated by now. I’m glad to have been wrong about that.” — Sam Altman, Sydney, May 26, 2026.Analyze the mechanics. To go public, you need three things: lenient regulators, a non-hostile public opinion, and institutional investors who aren’t afraid of political backlash. A CEO who spent two years predicting massive job destruction is an IPO risk. A CEO who says “actually I was wrong, everything’s fine” is bankable.The narrative changed. Not the technology. Not the data. The IPO calendar.Meanwhile, the real numbers tell a different story. May 2026: 115,000 jobs cut in tech. Meta laid off 8,000 people explicitly citing AI. Microsoft: 8,750 departures. Cisco: 4,000 cuts. Standard Chartered announced thousands more by 2030 “as AI replaces its workers.”The apocalypse isn’t coming. But 115,000 people still lost their jobs in a single month.$852 Billion for a Company Losing $14 Billion a YearLet’s stop at the numbers. Really stop.OpenAI: $852 billion valuation. $14 billion in projected losses for 2026. Profitability announced for 2029 at best, 2030 according to more cautious analysts. Price-to-sales ratio: 65 times 2025 revenue.For reference: Meta was valued at $104 billion at its IPO in 2012. Uber at $82 billion in 2019. Both were profitable or near profitable.Anthropic goes even further: $965 billion valuation. OpenAI isn’t even the most expensive anymore. The historical leader in generative AI is being outvalued by its main competitor, one week before its own S-1 filing.This is a race. Not a strategy.A race toward what exactly? Toward a profitability nobody can accurately date, fueled by infrastructure that devours capital the way a nuclear reactor devours uranium.Tech Eating ItselfHere’s the question nobody asks out loud.The $500 billion invested in AI in 2026, where does it actually go?It goes to Nvidia, which sells GPUs. To Microsoft, Amazon and Google, which sell computing power. Into data centers consuming the electrical equivalent of entire countries. Into increasingly large models that require more computing, which requires more GPUs, which requires more data centers.AI finances the infrastructure that runs the AI that justifies the investment in the infrastructure.It’s a closed ecosystem that values itself. Every dollar invested in OpenAI funds computing power that improves the model’s performance, which justifies the valuation that attracts the next billion.The real question isn’t “will AI revolutionize the world?” The real question is: “Who gets rich while it pretends to?”The answer is in the S-1.What the Latest Claude Isn’t Telling You About ItselfI use the latest models. Every day. For years.The improvements are real. Undeniable. Reasoning has gotten better. Context windows have exploded. Coding capabilities are genuinely impressive. I’m not saying the technology is a fraud.I’m saying the narrative around the technology might be.Because what the latest models do well is exactly what they already did, faster, better, cheaper. That’s not an anthropological revolution. That’s powerful industrial optimization. Useful. But not the civilizational rupture being sold.The civilizational rupture is the narrative. Not the product.And that narrative serves a precise function: to justify valuations that don’t hold up against cold financial analysis.The Question Wall Street Isn’t AskingHow does a company losing $14 billion a year get valued at $852 billion?By selling a story. The story of imminent superintelligence. Of inevitable exponential growth. Of the inflection point that’s perpetually “18 months away.”It’s the same mechanism as the dot-com bubble in 2000. The same arguments: “This time it’s different.” “The rules of finance don’t apply.” “Those who don’t invest now will regret it.”In 2000, Pets.com was worth billions. It delivered dog food. The business model didn’t hold. The market corrected.The difference with OpenAI? The technology is real. Powerful. The use cases exist. What doesn’t hold is the valuation.$852 billion for a money-losing company in a market where Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon can replicate the same capabilities with their own resources — and are already doing so.Conclusion: The Hummingbird and the AmazonMy 8-year-old daughter told me the story of the hummingbird.A massive fire is destroying the forest. All the animals flee, terrified, helpless. The hummingbird makes trip after trip to the river. One drop of water each time. The other animals watch, incredulous. “You’re ridiculous. You can’t put out this fire.” The hummingbird answers: “I know. But I’m doing my part.”And one by one, the other animals join in.What this story says about AI, nobody has articulated clearly yet.If we abandon critical thinking in the face of these companies’ narratives, if we swallow the story without looking at the numbers, if we buy the fear and then the stock without ever questioning the coherence, then yes. AI wins. Not because it’s superior. Because we surrendered.Every person who decides to look at the real numbers rather than follow the narrative permits another to do the same. Every executive who refuses to lay off workers “because of AI” to justify a restructuring that was already planned preserves something essential. Every investor who asks the simple question “how can a money-losing company be worth $852 billion?” is doing their part.This isn’t technological pessimism. The technology is real, powerful, useful. I live off it. I deploy it every day.This is discernment. The ability to distinguish what the technology actually does from what its sellers claim it does.AI only takes power if we give it.Not in one grand moment. One drop at a time.What you do with this article is one of them.Denis Atlan is a Fractional Chief AI Officer, founder of ENDKOO (Qualiopi-certified training organization), EU Commission AI Expert Evaluator, certified DPO and author of “AI Without Bullshit 2026.” He has deployed over 200 B2B AI projects in France with a documented median ROI of 159.8%.Sources: Reuters, Commonwealth Bank of Australia Conference, Sydney (May 26, 2026) — OpenAI confidential S-1, SEC filing (June 8, 2026) — Anthropic confidential S-1 (June 1, 2026) — CMC Markets, OpenAI IPO analysis (June 2026) — WSJ, OpenAI valuation (December 2025)This story is published on Generative AI. Connect with us on LinkedIn and follow Zeniteq to stay in the loop with the latest AI stories.Subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube channel to stay updated with the latest news and updates on generative AI. Let’s shape the future of AI together!AI Scares You. And Yet You’re About to Buy the Stock was originally published in Generative AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.Source: Generative AI Pub — Published — Category: Image AI