No, I don't think they'll be okay. A long slow death perhaps, but I would be surprised if they can dig themselves out of this hole.

You can't beat Google on high-quality data for pretraining; at scale, that's what really matters most, both in theory and practice. Other companies like Anthropic and DeepSeek are keeping up by taking advantage of smarter RL approaches, but I just don't see anyone at OpenAI with the research credentials to do that kind of work as they all left in the last mass exodus. They have been too complacent and let much of their high-quality talent go to their competition.