AI seems to be stumbling, OpenAI and Palantir bookend chaos
OpenAI abandons their hail marys, trying to go legit (ha), and Palantir is being aided by the president, totally normal, amirite?
Let's call this what it is: a week where the AI industry collectively face-planted, and a politician couldn't resist sticking his thumb in the market on behalf of his buddies. Buckle up.
Let's start with OpenAI continually finding ways to look unfocused, unserious, and untethered.
I care about AI, as it is becoming important in my professional work. Not for the outputs as much as for the hype cycles, and the inevitable return to reality. Yes, it is useful, but it doesn't replace people. At least at scale, and the current trajectory is not there, but that doesn't stop executives from over-reading the state of play and trying to warp reality.
Sora: The Fastest Social Network Nobody Asked For
Remember Sora? OpenAI's big swing at becoming a social media company? Yeah, that's dead now. Six months after launch. On March 24, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its AI-first TikTok clone, just months after its September 2025 launch.
Let me be fucking direct, this thing was never going to work. The fundamental premise was nonsensical. The business model was essentially: we pay for all the compute, users generate all the content, and somehow -magically- we make money. Or at least some shit like that, sorta like "we lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume". No surprise, it did not work. Unlike traditional social media that puts the burden of content generation on its users, the cost of generating Sora videos was exclusively on OpenAI, making the business model shaky from the start. Estimates put the burn rate somewhere between $1M and $15M a day depending on who you ask, for a product that was hemorrhaging users after the initial novelty wore off. And this was after the initial hype. Users actually running the app thirty days after downloading it was less than 5%. That is terrible. It was very unsticky. That is, people downloaded it, tried it, got a few yuks, and then never went back.
Yikes.
You know what is absolutely fucking insane? Disney, yes, the Walt Disney corporation, had committed $1 billion to the partnership, yet found out Sora was being shut down less than an hour before the public. One billion fucking dollars. Disney found out basically the same time as we did. That's gotta hurt. That's not a business relationship; that's a hostage situation.
Oh, and whole AI TikTok concept was fucking dunb to begin with. TikTok and its clones are already drowning in AI slop. Nobody was crying out for a platform that was exclusively AI slop. This was an "if we build it, they will come" moment, not a "here is an actual human problem we are solving" moment. As a product manager, it is shit like that that really grinds my gears. It reeked of executive interference, and a "because I said so" justification.
As if that wasn't bad enough...
The Erotica Fumble
The other OpenAI stumble this week: OpenAI paused its "adult mode" feature on March 26, 2026, after two delays and growing pressure from employees, advisers, and investors, saying it needs more research on the effects of AI sexual content before moving forward.
When this was originally announced, I immediately thought it was the classic "toss spaghetti at the wall" a Hail Mary to restart subscriber growth. Sam Altman announced last October that ChatGPT would allow erotica for verified adults, framing it as "treating adults like adults." Ok I guess, I mean there's plenty already out there, do you really need AI for thi? But the execution was a mess from the start. They delayed once. Then delayed again. Then killed it. OpenAI spent the last year trying to be everything: a video platform, a shopping portal, even a purveyor of AI erotica. Now it's racing to become a thing that makes money.
When I started in tech, back in the late 1990's, pornography had already become a significant fraction of traffic (60% was the number we all heard), and that has remained the case. You could (and likely should) cynically read this as OpenAI chasing porn traffic because porn has historically been one of the internet's biggest drivers - and we can make bank with it. The porn industry has legitimately pioneered online payment systems, streaming video, and content subscription models before anyone else figured it out. So OpenAI sees that and says "gimme some of that." Except they couldn't even launch the thing without it turning into a catastrophic shitshow of internal politics, employee pressure, and FTC scrutiny over minors. Two delays and a full cancellation later, Clammy-Sammy is back to square one. Do you feel sorry for his sad-sack ass? No, I thought not!
The real story here is what it says about OpenAI's strategic coherence: there isn't any. They are throwing shit at a wall in every direction and hoping something sticks before the IPO window opens.
I was going to write about Antrhopic, but I figured that this is long enough, and with the whole Mythos freakout (hint: it isn't as bad as you keep hearing. And if I ever have to read Nicholas Kristoff talk about tech again, I will probably go top my self off.) So, instead, let's look at Palantir:
You might recall my post last month on Alex Karp:
Geoff Anderson
He's back, and he's on an epic whinging tour...
The Palantir Puppet Show
Now we get to the part that actually pisses me off.
Palantir has been on a rough ride. Despite a brief recovery from Trump's Truth Social post, Palantir stock was on track for a roughly 13% weekly decline, bringing its 2026 losses to about 28%. Queue up the evil dude from Star Wars meme. The Iran ceasefire evaporated what analysts were calling the "war premium" that had propped up the stock, and Michael Burry came out swinging with a massive short position, arguing the fundamental value is under $50 a share.
I think that is a generous read. They don't even do real AI, or hold data, they are just a layer that mungs your data (think all that shit DOGE's teenie-weenies exfiltrated) with one of the foundational models (Anthropic is the soup du jour, even with the Government banishment, you seriously can't make this shit up), and then lets insane people like Pete Kegstand's christian nationalist minions use it to drive fucked up decisions, like bombing a girls school in Iran on the first day of the conflict because they had outdated intel. (note: I purposely kept the c small in christian nationalism, because it sure as shit ain't Christian)
Fuck, just typing that almost broke my brain.
This is a company trading at something like 200x forward P/E. That is bonkers. Like dot-com bubble level bonkers. Even Tesla in its frothiest, most delusional moments had more underlying justification than Palantir's current multiple. The stock hit nearly $200 last year. It's now at $127 and still arguably wildly overvalued.
And then, Trump posted on Truth Social: "Palantir Technologies has proven to have great warfighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!"
Which is a very fucked up thing for the President to post unprompted about a specific publicly traded company's stock. I remember when presidents didn't pick winners, but then I am almost 61, so there's that. I mean there was always some favoritisms, but it used to be subtle. Now, it's a sledge-hammer blow to the nuts.
What I think (I can't strictly prove it, but c'mon, you got eyes...): David Sacks, the former AI Czar who is now "co-chairing PCAST" (which is a fancy way of saying he got shuffled out of the real power seat after his public disagreements about Iran), still has his hands in Palantir and on Karp's dick. Sacks's venture firm Craft Ventures is an investor in Palantir. He's invested in 449 AI companies while shaping federal AI policy. He got ethics waivers (note to self: I could write a book longer than Gibbons' "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" about all the ethics waivers the Trump administration fuckers have) to do this while he was literally the government's AI czar. An investigation by The New York Times found that Sacks remains invested in 449 companies with AI products, while he labeled Palantir as merely "software as a service" on his ethics disclosures, despite Palantir's website claiming AI-driven capabilities. Snort, yeah, sure it's just a vanilla SaaS company like SFDC, and Jessica Alba just showed up at my door to whisk me away for a French Riviera spa adventure...
Now, I can't prove that Sacks picked up the phone and told someone to get Trump to post, but, again, c'mon. The PayPal Mafia network is tight: Thiel founded Palantir, Sacks is balls-deep in Craft, Karp has been dining with Trump. These people talk to each other constantly. Trump posting about a specific stock when that stock is getting crushed by a short squeeze and an unfavorable ceasefire is not random behavior. Presidents don't typically do stock tips on Truth Social for no reason. Ok, that made me laugh. This amount of specificity though for a company that isn't controlled by the Tangerine Tyrant is just bonkers.
And the cherry on top? Burry (he of "The Big Short") isn't budging. He said: "Trump's post rallied the stock after the stock had fallen 18% the last three days. The stock may catch a wind here. It has been selling off with software stocks. I continue to hold the puts, as I believe the fundamental value of this company is well under $50 per share." Under $50 is being generous (like Tesla really should be valued like a traditional automaker, and be valued at like $20 a share).
When Michael Fucking Burry, the guy who called the 2008 housing collapse, is holding his short position through a presidential endorsement, that tells you all ya need to know.
The whole Palantir story is the Silicon Valley corruption story in miniature. A company that was seeded by the CIA's venture arm, built its business on surveillance and military contracts, is now deeply embedded in the Trump administration through every possible back channel, and then the president of the United States personally intervenes in the market to prop up its stock on behalf of the buddies who helped put him in office. It's not subtle. It's a blaring klaxon calling a 5-alarm fire. Jesus Christ Monkeyballs, this gets tiring, but it is not even one iota surprising.
Wrapping Up
What a week.
OpenAI can't figure out what it wants to be, burning through capital on social media plays and erotica features that go nowhere. And Palantir is getting propped up by presidential tweets while Michael Burry sits on his puts and waits for gravity to do its thing.
I don't know what any of this means for the broader AI industry, but I do know that "move fast and break things" has officially become "move fast, leak everything, and have the president boost your stock." We've come a long way from the garage.
Welcome to the shitshow.
