The comparison to railroad bubble economics is apt. OpenAI's infrastructure costs are astronomical - training runs, inference compute, and scaling to meet demand all burn through capital at an incredible rate.

What's interesting is the strategic positioning. They need to maintain leadership while somehow finding a sustainable business model. The API pricing already feels like it's in a race to the bottom as competition intensifies.

For startups building on top of LLM APIs, this should be a wake-up call about vendor lock-in risks. If OpenAI has to dramatically change their pricing or pivot their business model to survive, a lot of downstream products could be impacted. Diversifying across multiple model providers isn't just good engineering - it's business risk management.