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OpenAI's Disruption Potential & Trillion Dollar Risk
OpenAI's ambition is bigger than you might think.
Travis Hoium
October 10, 2025
2 Things Before We Begin
Friday and Saturday, I will publish an update to the “State of the Portfolio” series I did in the spring (here’s Part 1 and Part 2). It seems like a good time to take a step back and look at operating performance and valuations of every stock in the portfolio, given the market’s pop this year.
Today, I’m “soft-launching” the Asymmetric Portfolio on Autopilot. We are working on graphics and videos that will accompany a wider launch over the next few weeks. I wanted to get the Asymmetric Portfolio on Autopilot because it allows users to passively follow what I’m doing without making individual investment decisions. It’s Asymmetric Investing on…Autopilot.
Trades are made automatically to copy the portfolio in your brokerage (Public and Robinhood are supported with Charles Schwab in beta).
The portfolio will be slightly different than the Asymmetric Portfolio because monthly allocations would trigger up to 23 taxable trades, so I will minimize trades while keeping results directionally similar to the Asymmetric Portfolio.
The best way to get started is by clicking this link on a mobile device, downloading the app, and connecting your brokerage.
There is a flat fee for Autopilot, but the amount you invest in the portfolio is unlimited.
Reply to this email with any questions, and I will have more to share in the coming weeks.
This week was one of the most significant in artificial intelligence development, as OpenAI and Sam Altman outlined their vision for becoming the gateway to the internet. If successful, ChatGPT won’t just be an app; it’ll be your companion around the internet and potentially replace all/most other apps.
It’s a big vision, but if OpenAI is successful, it could turn many of the companies in the Asymmetric Portfolio from aggregators to commodity suppliers. The economics of the internet could undergo significant changes.
I want to lay out the good, the bad, and the unknown of the current AI buildout and how I’m thinking about it in relation to the stocks I own and stocks I’m considering.
OpenAI The Disruptor
When the OpenAI app announcement came out this week, I thought this was the first moment we saw ChatGPT become potentially disruptive. It’s OpenAI trying to move beyond a chatbot toward being your home on the internet.
See how apps work in this video at 4:45.
What apps in ChatGPT do is allow developers to build apps right into ChatGPT. In theory, you could open ChatGPT on your iPhone, computer, and future AI devices and access the same apps without ever having those apps installed.
That’s the disruption. I’ve written many times that we want to invest in companies people choose to go to — Netflix, Spotify, Zillow, Amazon, etc — because the power is in owning the customer relationship. What if that relationship is that relationship is disintermediated by ChatGPT? Would the app become a commodity input?
For now, OpenAI wants apps as suppliers because it needs partners as suppliers, just like Netflix needed studio content before it started paying for its own content. But will the partners be needed in the future?
In a Stratechery interview, Altman said, “There was a version of this we could have done where it was a better user experience, but terrible for the partners.“ The benevolent Altman could have made a “better user experience,” but he wants the entire ecosystem to benefit?
BT: You had a great list of partners on stage with the apps in ChatGPT, you’ve taken a few swings at this. I’ve been, I think, enthusiastic about all of them, more, I think in part because I can see the overall vision. You had the connector or I can’t remember what the first one was, plugins or something, and then you had GPTs.
SA: ChatGPT plugins, that didn’t work. GPTs actually did work, GPTs get a surprising amount of usage, but inside a company or someone for their own workflows or whatever. But hopefully this works better and if it doesn’t, we’ll keep trying.
BT: Well, with these apps in there, is there a sense on your side it’s like, just to go back to the, “We have all this usage, it’s going to be better if I can just use Zillow in the app”? This idea of going somewhere else and Zillow says, “Oh, I’d rather them be in our app, we spent so much time on it”, do you feel you have the power to dictate, “For the user, it’s a better experience and because the users are here, if you’re not there, someone else will be” — and you’re sort of able to, dictate sounds bad, but if it’s a better user experience, that’s better for everyone else?
SA: No. Here’s another place that I think my early career training was useful. There was a version of this we could have done where it was a better user experience, but terrible for the partners.
BT: What would that look like?
SA: Well, I mean, on that Zillow example, what if you just said like, “Hey, ChatGPT, find me all of the houses that meet these things”, and we said we’re going to control the UI.
BT: Oh, right. So there’s no even a presentation layer of the Zillow app, you’re just getting the results.
SA: Yeah, yeah. But I felt really strongly that when we do this, it’s something that the whole ecosystem benefits from, and specifically that new startups can rocket into existence because of it. So we did this in a way where you very much have the relationship with the other site. You’re calling them by name, we’re suggesting them by name, they’re taking over the UI, they’re linking their account. So I think there was something we could have done that was maybe slightly more user-friendly, but not good for the other companies, and I really didn’t want us to do that.
I don’t think this is Altman thinking about anyone else. I think what we’re seeing is clear.
Altman wants to control the demand and have apps plug into ChatGPT, making them commodities. The power then lies with ChatGPT, not the apps.
In this world, OpenAI becomes Apple’s App Store, Google search, and Amazon.
That would truly be disruptive. But is the vision a feasible reality?
The 10x Question
And here’s where I get stuck.
There’s an idea, particularly in tech, that a product needs to be 10x better than the alternative to get customers to switch. Peter Thiel has talked about this, but it’s an axiom that’s well known in Silicon Valley.
You need to make sure your product is 10x better than that of your competitors. First, you’re probably exaggerating how much better it is. But also when you’re developing so is your competitor. So if you shoot for 10x better you might hit 3x better and that’s super important to win.
Is ChatGPT with apps really 10x better than opening an app?
Is an AI chatbot really 10x better than a Google search?
In some cases, yet. But ChatGPT NEEDS to be ubiquitous. It needs to be where you go to find dinner recipes, new underwear, and get healthcare questions answered.
A trillion-dollar infrastructure buildout can’t be supported by a niche product. It needs a MASSIVE product.
One way to make that paradigm shift is
OpenAI acquired LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s startup, with the idea of making a new generation of hardware.
And therein lies the trillion-dollar question. Will that hardware, combined with ChatGPT, be 10x better than just opening the Zillow app?
I’m skeptical, but aware that this is how disruption happens.
OpenAI’s Ecosystem and Competing Interests
I can make the argument that OpenAI is a disruptor. But I can also argue it’s a completely unsustainable business that will fall under the weight of its own ambitions. The entire funding and technology ecosystem is reliant on growing flows of money and bigger deals signed with OpenAI. But the conflicts and risks are clear.
NVIDIA has agreed to invest $100 billion into OpenAI
OpenAI turns around and makes a deal to buy AMD chips
OpenAI is also developing its own chips
Microsoft was all-in on OpenAI early and had exclusive rights to be its cloud provider
Microsoft gave up that opportunity because it didn’t feel comfortable with the risk/reward
AMD signed a multi-billion-dollar deal to sell chips to OpenAI
To pay for the chips, AMD gave OpenAI $33 billion of its own stock
Bloomberg published this graphic this week.
The web of investment is a mess. But right now, everyone wants to be in OpenAI’s ecosystem. And that’s understandable given the risk of falling behind.
The question is, what’s sustainable if OpenAI doesn’t become the gateway to the internet? What if reality falls short of ambition? It’s all a house of cards…
OpenAI’s Bubble
One thing I continue to come back to is how similar this moment is to the dot-com bubble and telecom buildout. The details are different, but the themes are the same.
There’s a drastic growth in demand for a new technology that requires massive amounts of infrastructure to be built.
Eventually, demand for the infrastructure stops growing exponentially, which leads to an overbuilding of infrastructure. The lack of an underlying business model for new entrants, even if their idea is directionally correct, results in the collapse of the bubble.
What’s different this time is how we talk about this bubble like, “well, duh.”
Second, we’ve obviously crossed the line into bubble territory, which always was inevitable. The question now is whether or not this is a productive bubble: what durable infrastructure will be built by eventually bankrupt companies that we benefit from for years to come?
Someone said this week that the dot-com bubble was a valuation bubble, and this may be a margin bubble. That seems directionally correct to me.
Sure, there are some companies with unsustainable valuations, but the bubble is in the incredibly valuable companies that drive the market’s valuation.
What’s concerning is that even huge companies like Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft are turning to debt and financing partners to build AI data centers. If the economics are so amazing, why not just build it yourself on your balance sheet? The shenanigans aren’t necessary.
If there’s a bubble and it bursts, it’s likely because OpenAI’s vision of being a disruptive product doesn’t become a reality, and the projected economics underlying the buildout never materialize. ChatGPT may just be a nice addition to our toolkit.
However, if OpenAI is successful, it would be a true disruption that could impact hundreds of tech companies for the worse.
On one side is disruption, and on the other is a bubble. That tradeoff seems clear to me today.
Disclaimer: Asymmetric Investing provides analysis and research but DOES NOT provide individual financial advice. Travis Hoium may have a position in some of the stocks mentioned. All content is for informational purposes only. Asymmetric Investing is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor, or a broker/dealer. Trading any asset involves risk and could result in significant capital losses. Please, do your own research before acquiring stocks.
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