Source: Finance Association
According to media reports, the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI's annual revenue may have exceeded 2 billion US dollars, making it one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history.
Two people familiar with the financial situation revealed that the startup reached the $2 billion milestone after multiplying the revenue in December 2023 by 12. They also said that in the context of commercial clients' strong interest in generative artificial intelligence, OpenAI could more than double that number by 2025.
Last year, some tech media mentioned that OpenAI's annual revenue in October had reached 1.3 billion US dollars, and the pace of growth is still accelerating. This growth rate will enable OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, to rank among a few Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Meta, that is, achieve annual revenue of 1 billion US dollars within 10 years of establishment.
Although the company experienced a “major personnel earthquake” in November last year, CEO Sam Altman (Sam Altman) was reinstated within a few days of being removed by the board of directors, and the impact on the company's business was almost negligible.
Altman has claimed that as of November 2023, 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI products, including ChatGPT and its underlying AI model “GPT-4,” and that the chatbot also has 100 million weekly users.
Many of OpenAI's competitors, including large technology companies such as Google and Meta, as well as startups such as Anthropic and Mistral, are also actively commercializing AI products. Recently, Google launched “Gemini Advanced,” which uses the Gemini Ultra model that Google has previously announced against GPT-4.
Altman has stated that OpenAI is still at a loss due to the huge cost of building and running the model. Spending is expected to continue to exceed revenue as the company develops more complex models. To cover these costs, the company might need to refinance tens of billions of dollars.
Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest supporter so far, has pledged up to $13 billion in funding. In return, Copilot, the AI assistant in Microsoft productivity applications, received support from the OpenAI model, and Microsoft's cloud service Azure is also benefiting from it.
To obtain capital, OpenAI sought to sell shares at a company valuation of 86 billion US dollars a few months ago, which is about three times that of April last year. In addition to this, Altman is also exploring options to increase chip supply to ease common computing power bottlenecks in the artificial intelligence industry.
Editor/Corrine