Author: Climber, CryptoPulse Labs
On June 9, OpenAI officially confirmed that it has secretly submitted an IPO application to the US SEC. At the same time, the company’s long-term technology roadmap has also been revealed for the first time, indicating that by 2028, AI will undertake most of its own research and development work.
It seems like just a regular listing move, but behind it signifies that the logic of the AI industry has changed. Technological competition is transforming into capital competition, and capital competition is further evolving into ecological warfare.
For the crypto market, this may not just be a tech news story, but the beginning of a new funding narrative.
1. From Chatbot to AI Empire: The Business Evolution of OpenAI
If we look back ten years, very few would have thought that an artificial intelligence laboratory could grow into the most watched tech giant in the world.
When OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was actually positioned as a non-profit research organization, aiming to ensure that the development of artificial intelligence could truly benefit humanity rather than being controlled by a few institutions. At that time, OpenAI resembled more of an academic lab than a commercial company.
The true change in the industry landscape occurred with the explosion of ChatGPT in 2022. After its launch, ChatGPT surpassed 100 million users within just a few months, becoming one of the fastest-growing consumer products in internet history. From that moment on, OpenAI began transitioning from a research institution to a commercial giant.
Today, OpenAI's business has expanded across multiple directions. The most easily recognizable product for the general public is the ChatGPT, which has gradually developed from a simple chat tool into a comprehensive AI assistant with features including search, content generation, image generation, code writing, and AI Agents.
Additionally, another major business of OpenAI is enterprise services. Many companies leverage its large model capabilities through API calls, including customer service systems, automated office solutions, development tools, and enterprise-level AI solutions.
What’s more noteworthy is that its strategic focus has begun to shift. The latest roadmap indicates that OpenAI hopes to develop automated AI researchers in the future, utilizing AI to develop the next generation of AI models. Simply put, in the future, AI will not only participate in work but may also be involved in technological creation.
Among all its businesses, the biggest cost isn’t software but infrastructure.
Training AI models requires massive GPUs, the operational process requires data centers, and future Agent systems will need larger computational networks to support them. OpenAI has previously disclosed plans to invest approximately $600 billion in AI infrastructure by 2030.
Therefore, today’s OpenAI is no longer just a chatbot company, but more like a super platform spanning AI applications, cloud services, computing power, and future infrastructures.
However, at the same time, the immense pressure also exists behind rapid growth. Increasing model training costs, unverified profit models, executive departures, and organizational structure disputes have also raised concerns about its long-term development capabilities.
High-speed growth accompanied by high consumption may very well be the most accurate representation of OpenAI's current state.
2. AI War Escalation: Technological Competition is Turning into a Cash Burn Battle
Many might wonder why OpenAI, having just completed over a hundred billion dollars in funding, is eager to go public. The reason is quite simple; the AI industry is incredibly cash-intensive.
In the traditional internet era, a company's main expenditures might come from server and labor costs. However, in the age of large models, the largest expenses have shifted to computing power costs.
Training a stronger model requires hundreds of thousands or even millions of GPUs to participate in calculations. After the model goes live, continuous inference services are required to support user engagement. With the arrival of the Agent era, future computing power consumption may even grow exponentially.
The publicly disclosed roadmap by OpenAI mentions the hope to achieve AI and researchers collaborating to complete most research and development work by 2028. This indicates that in the future, not only will humans use AI, but AI itself will also begin to consume substantial computational resources.
In the capital markets, it may be the only sufficiently large pool of funds available right now.
The secret submission of the S-1 document is essentially a preparatory move. The company can undergo SEC review without disclosing a lot of financial details while preserving more flexibility for future listing.
More importantly, OpenAI’s competitors have already begun to take action. Anthropic has taken the lead in submitting an IPO application and has achieved a valuation that surpasses OpenAI in its latest funding round.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk's xAI is continuously expanding through the ecosystem of X and SpaceX, and Google and Meta are also aggressively investing resources.
The entire AI industry has begun to enter a state similar to an arms race.
In the past, the competition was about model capabilities, but now the competition revolves around capital, computing power, ecosystems, and user scale. Compared to its competitors, OpenAI’s greatest advantages stem not just from technology.
First is the user entry advantage. For many ordinary users, ChatGPT has almost become synonymous with AI. Second is the developer ecosystem. Numerous startup projects and companies are built on the OpenAI interface system, creating a strong network effect. Finally, there’s brand advantage. Just like the cognitive barriers formed around Google during the search era, OpenAI has established a presence in the hearts and minds of the public.
However, post-IPO, the company will also face new issues. Previously, OpenAI dealt with investment firms, but now it will face the entire capital market. Previously, the focus was on future narratives, while the future market will be more concerned about profits, revenue, and financial data.
This is a threshold that all super unicorns must cross.
3. After OpenAI Rings the Bell, Who Will Become the Biggest Winner in Crypto?
For the crypto market, what is truly worth paying attention to about OpenAI's IPO is not the stock price, but the change in funding logic. In the past few rounds of crypto bull markets, the core narrative has almost always stemmed from the external world.
The DeFi of 2020, the NFT of 2021, the later RWA, and the recent AI Agents, are essentially results of real-world changes reflecting into the crypto market.
OpenAI's IPO may mean that the AI narrative is entering a new phase. Previously, market speculation was more focused on AI applications, such as AI chat, AI assistants, and AI Agent projects. However, future market interests may gradually shift towards AI means of production.
Thus, the first to benefit could very well be the AI computing power sector. As GPU resources become increasingly expensive, the importance of decentralized computing networks is beginning to rise. More and more projects are attempting to build distributed computing markets through idle GPUs.
Projects like Render, Bittensor, Akash, and io.net belong to this logic, and if AI demand continues to explode, these projects may regain funding attention.
Another direction that may benefit is the AI Agent sector. OpenAI has clearly proposed a plan for automated AI researchers. This means that in the future, AI will not only be responsible for content output but can autonomously execute complex tasks.
The crypto world is inherently suitable for constructing an AI economic system, and thus related projects may continue to gain market attention.
Additionally, the AI data layer and AI combined with RWA may also become new directions. In the future, numerous computational assets, data centers, and AI infrastructures will require financing, and assetization on-chain may become a new trend.
Of course, it should be noted that OpenAI's IPO may also create a fund siphoning effect.
If a significant amount of capital begins to flow towards AI supergiants, some high-risk funds may flow out of the crypto market. Therefore, the true beneficiaries may not be all AI concept coins, but those that possess real business, genuine demand, and infrastructural capabilities.
Conclusion
In the past few years, many have believed that the core of the AI revolution lies in the models. However, it has become increasingly clear that what might truly determine victory or defeat is not the models themselves, but who has more capital, more computing power, and a larger ecosystem.
OpenAI’s secret submission of its IPO is superficially just a listing action, but it represents that the AI industry is entering a new era. For the crypto market, the issue truly worth focusing on in the future may not be whether AI will change the world, but who can become the water, electricity, and coal of the AI era.
Because in every gold rush, the ones who truly make money are often not the prospectors, but the ones selling the shovels.
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