OpenAI Misses Expectations - Should Tech Investors Worry?

0:01Tyler Crowe:Open AI jitters on Motley Fool's Hidden Gems Investing podcast.

0:09Tyler Crowe:Welcome to Motley Fool's Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Tyler Crowe and with my longtime colleagues and Fool contributors, Lou Whiteman and Matt Frankel. Earnings are kicking up. MAG7 have not reported yet, so we're going to take a quick pause and not to talk about MAG7 earnings, although it's probably going to be on later shows this week. Instead, we want to start today talking about OpenAI and some struggles that were released in the Wall Street Journal. We're going to talk General Motors' earnings, as well as hitting a mailbag question that we got earlier in the week. But like I said at the top, we're going to start with OpenAI.

0:42Tyler Crowe:There was a Wall Street Journal article that came out either last night or this morning that was reporting that OpenAI isn't meeting some of its user revenue goals, and it's making all that spending and compute power that we've been talking about for the past several weeks, months even a couple years it's getting harder to swallow and there's been some knock-on effects on the market as well shares of companies that with close ties open ai are down on the news thinking companies like oracle and core weave now guys i'm going to ask you uh lou matt i'm going to ask you guys your thoughts on this in a minute but this is what stood out to me is that ceo sam altman is trying to move towards an ipo somewhat aggressively but the company raised 122 billion less than a month ago.

1:25Tyler Crowe:And I find it odd that a company that has raised so much money recently is already preparing an IPO for what I would assume is more funding. I thought that's what IPOs are for. So there's a bunch of other angles I'm sure we can take here. You guys all have your own takes, but let's start with this. Are companies that have hitched their wagon to open AI, like the oracles, like the core weaves of world, in a little bit of stress or trouble here based on what was said in this Wall Street Journal report. Matt, let's start with you. Yeah. Nobody has been more skeptical about OpenAI's longer-term revenue projections, all these circular deals we're seeing among these AI companies.

2:04No one's been more skeptical about all this than me. Maybe you. Management has said$280 billion of revenue by 2030, which that's more than NVIDIA has by a mile. But take this report with a big grain of salt. The report said that OpenAI missed its internal growth projections, which have been aggressive. It didn't specify by how much it missed. And as Tyler mentioned, with a recent$122 billion raise and an upcoming IPO, the company shouldn't have much of a problem fulfilling at least its near-term contractual obligations. On a similar note, though, I feel like Oracle's investors are already very skeptical about OpenAI's ability to pay for what it's agreed to pay already over the long term.

2:47Even before today's downward movement, Oracle was down 50 % since that surge after the OpenAI deal was announced in September. And a big reason why has to be investor skepticism over the deal's feasibility.

3:01Lou Whiteman:Yeah, I don't know who's been more skeptical, Matt or Tyler, who's the most skeptical. But it feels like it's hard to find someone other than Sam Altman who hasn't been skeptical about OpenAI's grand pronouncements. I guess maybe, though, the C-suites at Oracle and CoreWeave would be the exceptions, the ones that weren't. Thing is, these are long-term projections in a Wild West market, a market that still hasn't formed. Two years ago, when OpenAI was the bell of the ball, was riding high, had we even heard of Anthropic? No. And in theory, I don't know why that can't happen again. So, I'm not saying it will, but I don't think first-mover advantage here really matters.

3:41Lou Whiteman:And I'm not sure that even if OpenAI isn't on a winning streak today, that really can be extrapolated into the future. My question is, how does any of this make sense, guys? Who's going to make money here? Part of the reason OpenAI put out outrageous revenue assumptions is they have to offset outrageous spending needs. Anthropic is throttling people because compute is so expensive. OpenAI still needs to raise money. I think the market just needs to wake up to just how much money is needed here. It feels like one of three things has to happen. Either, number one, we need models that really dramatically bring down the compute demand, so there's just less that needs to be spent.

4:24Lou Whiteman:Number two, these hyperscalers somehow end up with amazing pricing power from here, even though they're competing with each other, and jack up the prices. or I don't know, maybe these valuations aren't sustainable.

4:38Tyler Crowe:I hate to say it, but maybe. I like the point of like, you know, OpenAI could come back around, ChatGPT could, you know, have a comeback. We've seen these AI models kind of rise and fall really quickly and makes you think of like internet search browsers of the 90s where it was Netscape, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo were the dominant forces for a long time. And then before you know it, Google comes around and wallops them all. There's no reason to think that something like that couldn't happen here. And to your point about lower compute, Lou, like we all, in a related news, DeepSeek, the Chinese open-sourced AI model that kind of had everyone shaking in their boots in January last year of like, oh my goodness, they can do this on basically spare car parts.

5:20Tyler Crowe:How the heck did they do this? Well, they updated their model. And according to VentureBeat in the release I was looking at, it says that either surpassed some of the, you know, either met or surpassed some of the like specifications of open AI and anthropic models. And they were doing it at almost one fifth the compute costs that we're seeing with these, uh, you know, closed loop LLMs, like what anthropic and open AI have. Now, I think for a while, the conversation around AI has been capability, you know, that real wow factor of like what it can do. We've seen with like things like Sora with those videos, which not coincidentally something that got axed as they're looking to you know get towards some semblance of looking like there might be profit or some sort of thing that's not an empty vacuum of cost but i think we're going to now start seeing with these llm models a focus more on cost efficiency it's going to be a part of the conversation because as you said right now no one's making money with this and eventually creditors investors they will want to see something that's moving towards something that doesn't look like a vacuum sucking every dollar out of your wallet.

6:30Lou Whiteman:Or at least something that can cover expenses. I think that'd be a nice first start. I like what you did there with car parts, by the way, telegraphing our next story. Maybe that is where valuation can come from. But yeah, look, if I'm honest, it isn't any one of those three factors or three scenarios that I laid out above. It's some sort of combination of all of them. inevitably, as you say, the tech advances will happen and the cost will come down. But I also think AI really needs intense compute power, and that compute power, there's limits to how cheap it can get. That is expensive. So, I think the interesting thing from here and how this all plays out is, how far does that cost needle move and how quickly, and how that is going to just ripple through all of these customers, what they're going to have to spend, or if they're going to change their assumptions.

7:22Lou Whiteman:That is the real question. It's somewhere in the middle. I still don't know. It's going to be hard to really hit that sweet spot where these companies make money, but they don't bankrupt all their customers for what they're charging. On one hand, I'm taking the deep seat thing with a big grain of salt. One-fifth the cost for a computer sounds a lot more reasonable than their initial claim. Remember when they launched the initial model and said they built it for$6 million or something silly like that? So this sounds a little bit more reasonable, but I'm not putting too much stock into that. But so when it comes to the eventual getting to profitability and things like that, on one hand, revenue generated by OpenAI and Profic and all that, it should be very high margin as it scales, other than the initial capital spending, just like most SaaS businesses.

8:09But there's a big question when it comes to competitive pricing pressures from DeepSeek and elsewhere. I don't know which one's going to be the ask Jeeves, as Tyler put it. The speed at which growth will happen compared to the speed of the build-out. There's a lot of moving parts here. If I were a creditor in this ecosystem, I would be nervous now.

8:30Tyler Crowe:Speaking of competition and cost and trying to move down the commodity curve really quickly, we're going to go to one of the ultimate commodity curve businesses, and that's Otto is talking about GM's earnings coming up after the break.

8:40Lou Whiteman:Hey, it's Parker Posey. How did I get here? I love improvisation when it comes to acting, but when it comes to a real-life plan, I stick to a script. Cue the music. Invest in your story with DIA, the only ETF that tracks the Dow. From State Street. Getting there starts here. Before investing, consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. Visit statestreet.com slash IM for perspectives containing this and other information. Read it carefully. DIA is subject to risks similar to those of stocks. All ETFs are subject to risk, including possible loss of principal. Alps Distributors, Inc.

9:09Lou Whiteman:Distributors.

9:10Tyler Crowe:Shares of General Motors are down about 1.9 % as we're taping this today after the company posted better than expected earnings. Earnings per share on an adjusted basis came in at about$2.82 per share, which was actually down from$3.35 this time last year. But there were some adjustments, such as expected tariff refund of about$500 million. And they also notched some one-time costs of about$1 billion related to its pivot in the electric vehicle business strategy that kind of boosted the end results and exceeded investor expectations. We could probably discuss the pivot to EVs in the middle of a rising gas crisis.

9:51Tyler Crowe:It sounds like an interesting topic for another time. But Matt, you were the one that put GM on our radar, and it's been a stock you have been really pounding the table for a while. So looking through the report, what really stood out to you? Yeah, so I don't want to fixate on the headline numbers. You already kind of covered some of those, although earnings were stronger than expected after those adjustments that you mentioned. The tariff refunds also were largely expected. Just now we have some actual numbers behind them. It was just a solid quarter all around for GM. Margins were strong despite a challenging consumer environment.

10:23GM's incentives to buyers pretty impressively are at the very low end of the industry. A lot of car makers are having to give big discounts, give big financing incentives, things like that. GM is definitely lower than average on that. The company maintained its number one US market share for total sales, which that wasn't a surprise. It is the clear number two in EVs. Cadillac EV sales, which my wife bought one not that long ago, grew 20 % year over year. GM now has a 13 % market share, and that's up sequentially from 10%. So they have a pretty good share of the EV market, only buying Tesla. Because of the solid results and the reduced tariff impact, GM did raise its guidance pretty significantly.

11:03They're now calling for$12.50 per share in earnings at the midpoint. That applies to GM's trading for 6.4 times full-year earnings. So beyond the headline numbers, one thing I would say to watch, because we always talk about software and SaaS businesses and things like that, is the software and services side of GM. Supercruise paid subscriptions were up 70 % year over year. GM expects to have$850 ,000 by the end of this year. This is going to be a very high margin revenue stream. Most reviews agree that Supercruise is the best with the exception of maybe Tesla, and I've driven it, so I can attest to that.

11:40Software has been a big focus of Mary Bar's growth strategy. It's not just Super Cruise, but OnStar has 13 million paid subscribers, and it's largely flown under the radar, and it's starting to become a significant revenue stream.

11:52Lou Whiteman:Yeah, I'd be really curious to see how sustainable that is, because you have a 100-year tradition in the auto business of features starting as premium and moving downstream to standard. I mean, my Honda can do 90 % of what Super Cruise does, and it came as standard, non-subscription. I think I'm fascinated. I don't know which way it's going to go, whether or not GM will continue to have pricing power and be able to keep those margins, or if it'll just end up as standard equipment the way windshield wipers and electric windows and everything else has done over time. I'll say this for GM. I hope for their sake it does, because the core industry, the core business is just brutal.

12:33Lou Whiteman:And when times are good, it's a brutal business. So, they would really, really benefit from some high-margin software sales. I'm just not sure if we can really pencil that into the foreseeable future.

12:47Tyler Crowe:Who doesn't want to be a high-margin software sales company? Even the autos want to get in on this. So, a couple of weeks ago, we did a longer show on the Chinese EV market and how competitive it is. Even talking about the competitive American market, it seems like the Chinese EV market is even more competitive today. And that really bore out because BYD announced its earnings earlier this week as well. And they saw their earnings fall 55%. I mean, yes, GM's earnings were down from the year prior, but this is not even close when you're talking about the EV market in China right now. And it shows how competitive the Chinese market and some of the non-U.S.

13:25Tyler Crowe:international markets are compared to what's going on in the U.S. Because it seems like in a lot of the international markets, I hate to use this word because it insinuates things related to trade. But the Chinese electric vehicles are, quote-unquote, flooding the market. Yeah.

13:43Lou Whiteman:Flooding, or another word for that might be winning, right? Look, I know we like bold predictions around here. I don't know if this is really going to happen, but I do think it's sort of this is the way the stars are aligning. GM's strength is pickups and SUVs. We see that with Ford, too. The U.S. remains this amazing island, fighting back against global trends towards fuel economy, smaller cars, all of that. And I'd note that, look, elsewhere, it's not so good. GM sales were down 22 % year-over-year in China. I think it's possible that between tariffs, consumer preferences, restrictions on foreign imports to the U.S.

14:18Lou Whiteman:market, we're evolving towards a world where GM and the other U.S. automakers will just dominate the U.S. market, but have a really hard time competing basically everywhere else. Good news there is the U.S. market's very big, but it's not what we would have imagined just 20 years ago. Coming up after the break, we're going to go dip into the mailbag. Get a concise daily market preview from Charles Schwab, including stock updates, U.S. and global economic news, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Schwab Market Update is an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

14:55Lou Whiteman:Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less. Listen today at schwab.com slash market update podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. That's schwab.com slash market update podcast.

15:10Tyler Crowe:Hey everyone, just a quick reminder. If you want to get your questions in, we love answering questions. This is probably one of my, at least my favorite segment that we get to do on the podcast. So get your questions in as much as can. We are clearly getting way more than we can actually answer. And I'm going to do my best to try to get in as many as possible. Maybe we'll even look into some other ways that we can answer them elsewhere. But if you want to get them in, email us at podcast at fool.com. That email is podcasts at fool.com. We'd love to hear from you. Our only requests are keep it foolish and try to keep it short so I can answer it on air.

15:44Tyler Crowe:And this was a nice one. This is very relevant because we've had earnings reports out. We're starting to get proxy votes for people who own shares of individual companies, which I think for a lot of people might not know what that is. And that's related to today's question. So this comes from Jet Hayes, a 25-year-old fool since 2023. As part owners of individual companies, how should we look at proxy voting? Does our vote really count? And how do we as individuals think about using their votes? Thanks. Matt, look, I'm going to go last because this is one of my soapbox topics. So I'm going to let you guys go first.

16:28Tyler Crowe:And Matt, you can go first. Yeah, I don't really care about my ability to vote in corporate matters when buying stock. And I mean, I don't view it as my patriotic duty, like voting in presidential elections and things like that. For example, when I buy a stock with both voting and non-voting shares, let's say Alphabet, for example, I'll typically go with the non-voting shares since it carries the same economic interest and is usually a bit cheaper. As an individual investor, the reality is your vote isn't likely to have serious pull. On the other hand, I do care about how the company itself structures its voting.

17:01Using that Alphabet example, there is a class of shares called the Class B shares that have 10 votes per share, whereas even the voting publicly traded ones only have one. They're designed to give insiders control, and I do care about things like that. There are a lot of companies that do this, and that absolutely factors into my investment thesis.

17:19Lou Whiteman:So, straight up, I'm part of the problem here. Tyler, I'm curious to hear what you have to say about me in a second, but I don't think much about it at all. I'm not proud of it. I should care. I don't even honestly usually vote my shares, in part because my brokerage system is so clunky and annoying and I own like 80 stocks and it just takes forever. And yeah, those are terrible, terrible reasons. Don't be like me. I know I should do better. I know governance matters, but if I'm honest, it just does not factor at all into my investment decisions.

17:50Tyler Crowe:All right, here we go. I'm climbing up on the soapbox. I'm going to get really high and mighty. We might even need to put some like patriotic music in the background while I do this. But look, here is my thesis. And yes, I think you should vote your shares. If you own individual shocks. You should care. You should read your proxy filings. You should vote on everything that you have. Again, as Jet mentions in the question, you are an owner of the company. You're actually putting in the extra effort to not just buy a diversified ETF and go sit on our butts. That would be great. There's plenty of options to do that out there in the market.

18:25Tyler Crowe:But if we are making the choice to invest in individual companies and be fractional owners of that company's management works for us. And it's our duty to vote on the results of this business and how in the things that they're asking us to do. Vote on the board of directors, vote on executive compensation. Do I really care who the auditor is? No, but that's that's maybe there's somebody that does. But look, this is one of those things where it's like, it is the one time that we as individual investors can hold management to account. And yes, maybe my little peance of an ownership in a stock doesn't really matter to the overall voting.

19:07Tyler Crowe:But it's just like some moral craw that I have that if I'm going to own a company, it is my obligation in some way to vote for it. One of my favorite writers of all time was Benjamin Graham. He had a whole chapter dedicated to your duties as an investor to vote your shares and be a part and participate in the companies that you own. I know I'm standing on a very, very lonely island these days when it comes to investing in individual stocks and actually voting your proxy shares. But if I have to be the one last voice before the door closes, I'm going to be it.

19:45Lou Whiteman:You know, Tyler, it's funny. I don't disagree with any of that. And yet here I am. But yeah, definitely read the proxies, even if you don't vote.

19:52Tyler Crowe:Look, I'm not saying it's easy, but you just, I feel like everyone just has to do it. Even if you just do it once for the first time, it does feel empowering when like you see an egregious stock compensation package for one of your executives and you just get to say no. Sometimes that just feels good. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers.

20:24Tyler Crowe:Advertisers are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Thanks to our producer, Christy Waterworth. I'm filling in for our normal crew today and the rest of the Motley Fool team. For Lou, Matt, myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.