Sam Altman is doing something unusual for a Silicon Valley CEO: admitting things didn’t go great. In a CNBC interview on June 1, 2026, the OpenAI chief acknowledged that his company missed internal targets for both new users and revenue as of late April, calling concerns about massive AI spending and unclear payback timelines “the most fair criticism right now of AI.”

The numbers behind the honesty

OpenAI has exceeded 800 million weekly active users by early 2026. The company had projected losses of up to $14 billion in mid-2026. Revenue continues to grow from prior years, but it’s not growing fast enough to keep pace with the infrastructure spending required to stay at the frontier of AI development.

Altman also pointed to a frustrating product problem. Updates to ChatGPT have, at times, underperformed previous versions, a dynamic that was publicly flagged as early as January 2026.

On the brighter side, Altman cited a 54% increase in token efficiency for certain tasks in newer model iterations. If you can do the same work with roughly half the compute, your cost structure starts looking a lot more sustainable.

The bigger picture for investors

Robust user growth, even 800 million weekly actives, does not automatically translate into financial success. The $14 billion projected loss figure is staggering by any standard. OpenAI can sustain these losses because of its investor base, which includes Microsoft and sovereign wealth funds.