Working on cutting-edge AI is unfortunately expensive. For example, in addition to DeepMind, Google also has Google Brain, Research and Cloud. And TensorFlow, TPUs, and they own about a third of all research (in fact, they hold their own AI conferences).

I also strongly doubt that computing power will be necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) to achieve AGI. If historical trends are any indication, progress in artificial intelligence is primarily driven by systems – computing, data, infrastructure. The core algorithms we use today have remained largely unchanged since the ~90s. Not only that, but any algorithmic advancement published somewhere in the paper can be almost immediately re-implemented and incorporated. In contrast, algorithmic progress is inherently inert without a scale that also makes it terrifying.

It seems to me that OpenAI is spending money today and that the funding model cannot scale to seriously compete with Google (an 800B company). If you can't seriously compete, but continue to openly explore, you may actually be making things worse and helping them “for free”, because any progress is pretty easy for them to copy and incorporate immediately, on a large scale.

A profit center could create a more sustainable revenue stream over time and with the current team would probably bring in a lot of investment. However, building a product from scratch would steal the focus from AI research, take a long time, and it's unclear whether the company can “catch up” to Google's scale, and investors could put too much pressure in the wrong directions. The most promising option I can think of, as I mentioned earlier, would be for OpenAI to join Tesla as its cash cow. I believe that attachments to other big suspects (eg Apple? Amazon?) would fail due to incompatible company DNA. Using a rocket analogy, Tesla has already built the “first stage” of the rocket with the entire Model 3 supply chain and its onboard computer and persistent Internet connection. The “second phase” would be a completely self-contained solution based on the training of large-scale neural networks, which OpenAI's expertise could significantly accelerate. With a working fully self-driving solution in ~2-3 years we could sell a lot of cars/trucks. If we do this really well, the transportation industry is big enough that we could grow Tesla's market cap to high O (~100K) and use that revenue to fund AI work at scale.

I don't see anything else that has the potential to achieve Google-level sustainable equity within a decade.