I completely agrees with you that OpenAI will die if it cannot sustain investor interest or become profitable. This brings us back to the topic of disruptive innovation.
Question: Can a company be considered a disruptor if it dies due to lack of profitability?
My answer is a firm yes. This is well illustrated in the “Uber revolution” of mainland China: Virtually all of the initial entrants were gone within a couple of years, since they could not keep subsiding customers forever. However, as people get accustomed to Uber-ing, late-comers are able to sustain profitable business without using generous subsidies. And the traditional taxi industry has essentially been wiped out. Disruptors have died; the disruption lives.
Same goes for OpenAI: even if it would not survive to the end, the disruption has already taken place. Many for-profit AI service providers, which do not bear the burden of training their own mammoth model, have sprung up and apparently been running well. Does it really matter whether OpenAI becomes profitable? Nope, as long as others do. Whatever OpenAI’s fate will be, history will probably remember it as the pioneer of an era of disruption. By whom was that disruption funded? The investors.
P.S. It seems we are holding different perspectives on the same story. For you, the business’s (first-person) perspective; for me, the bystander/commentator’s (third-person) perspective.
Propaganda, characteristically, performs well in first-person perspectives, but does not hold up in third-person perspectives. (Think of e.g. nationalism.) Thus I’m inclined to put the disruptive innovation theory in this category.