OpenAI, the Californian startup that developed ChatGptis well on its way to generating over a billion dollars in revenue over the next 12 monthsthanks to the sale of services based on artificial intelligence.
The estimate was made by The Information, the paid information site created in 2013 by E. Lessin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. The Information focuses primarily on technology and business and is a source deemed credible by professionals and investors.
Always The Information, at the beginning of last May, had revealed that OpenAI in 2022 had losses of $540 million related to the development of ChatGpt.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
In just three months the situation seems to have changed radically. According to The Information, the company led by Sam Altman now generates revenue of about 80 million dollars a month. A large part of the money comes from users who pay 20 dollars a month to access the Plus version. In the period in which ChatGpt was “free”, in fact, OpenAI was able to collect around 28 million dollars a month.
The Information published its report the day following the announcement of ChatGpt Enterprises, a new service for companies that OpenAI has been working on for a year. Sam Altman’s company has made it known that ChatGpt Enterprise is already being used by several companies including Canva, Estée Lauder and PwC.
The business subscription – whose cost is not yet known – will allow companies to take advantage of a more powerful and above all safer version of ChatGpt: corporate data will not be used by OpenAI to train its artificial intelligence. Conversation input and output also they will be encrypted. In this way, OpenAI intends to overcome the distrust of large companies which have so far prevented their employees from using ChatGpt, for fear of having to face a leak of valuable data.
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In fact, it should be remembered that on 20 March a ChatGpt bug allowed some subscribers to consult the conversations – as well as ChatGPT Plus payment details – of other users. OpenAI later claimed that the number of users exposed to this information was “very low”.
Although ChatGpt faced its first significant drop in users last June, and despite the increasingly fierce competition – users looking for generative AI also have access to Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard, both free – the future of OpenAI looks rosy, in line with the valuation that was made of the company – about 27 billion dollars – after a sale of shares worth 300 million dollars.
OpenAI, born in 2015 as a non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory, has shed its skin over time and has become a profit-seeking company. This is one of the reasons they turned away Elon Muskone of the co-founders of OpenAI.
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The leadership of the company has been entrusted to Sam Altmanthe former president of Y Combinator, who struck a deal with Microsoft last January a deal worth $10 billion. In return, the Mountain View company was able to count on the algorithms underlying ChatGpt to revitalize its historic search engine, Bing, and to inject generative artificial intelligence in its package Officewhich now uses “Copilot” technology.
But Microsoft’s money wouldn’t have kept OpenAI alive for long if the San Francisco company hadn’t studied other ways of collecting.
we will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering
— Sam Altman (@sama) December 5, 2022
In December 2022, when ChatGpt made history for having registered the highest number of active users in the first month of its launch, i.e. 100 millionSam Altman stated the need to “monetize” the service because the cost to OpenAI to run ChatGpt was “eye-watering”, a way of saying “huge”.