In a way, Silicon Valley has always asked investors to suspend disbelief to fund pie-in-the-sky projects, but the AI boom calls for something closer to a full break from financial reality.
It’s 2026. Last year, investors lavished $80 billion on foundation AI companies — the ones building huge, general-purpose AI systems. They all have yet to even break even, let alone turn a profit. That being the case, you may ask yourself: is anyone even trying to make money from all this AI stuff?
The answer, as TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom explains, is a resounding “not really, no.”
In order to keep track of who‘s doing what in the AI space, Brandom came up with a five-level scale to grade AI companies. Of course, with so few projects actually bringing in revenue, financial success isn’t very helpful for tracking performance. Instead, Brandom went with a vibes-based system, rating companies based on how hard they’re trying to make money.
“The idea here is to measure ambition, not success,” he writes.
The scale maxes out at level five — “we are already making millions of dollars every day, thank you very much” — and goes down to level one, where “true wealth is when you love yourself.”
Brandom starts with humans&, a relatively quiet AI company with a name that looks like a typo which has received plenty of good press lately. Despite raising $480 million for a valuation of $4.48 billion, the company has yet to articulate an actual product it plans on shipping, earning it a rating of level three, meaning “we have many promising product ideas, which will be revealed in the fullness of time.”
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a hazy “superintelligent AI” company founded by Ilya Sutskever, the eccentric former chief scientist of OpenAI, gets a level one. SSI is so committed to its vague vision that it turned down a $32 billion acquisition from Meta — an incredibly generous offer for a company that had yet to generate any revenue at the time of its $20 billion valuation.
“There are no product cycles, and, aside from the still-baking superintelligent foundation model, there doesn’t seem to be any product at all,” Brandom writes. “With this pitch, [Sutskever] raised $3 billion!”
Meanwhile, the $2 billion company Thinking Machines Lab could be due for a downgrade from level four to level two, “we have the outlines of a concept of a plan.” Thinking Machines Lab was co-founded by Mira Murati, who had served as the chief technology officer — and very briefly as CEO, during the mutiny against Sam Altman — at OpenAI. Now Thinking Machines is suffering something of a coup of its own over recent weeks, the New York Times reported, with high-level officials defecting to other AI companies as the much-hyped startup descends into a “perpetual soap opera.”
One thing’s for sure: if confidence could be bottled and sold, these companies would be profitable on day one.
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