On the morning of November 18, during a tech conference in Tokyo, Ting Cai received a news alert about OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who had been ousted in a boardroom coup. Cai, chief data officer of Japanese tech giant Rakuten, was caught off guard. He had flown back from San Francisco days earlier, where he had recently seen the chief executive of the artificial intelligence pioneer and his team, with whom Rakuten had been collaborating on a new AI business platform. Straight away, the Japanese executive was reassured by OpenAI’s senior management that there had been no wrongdoing on Altman’s part, and Rakuten decided to keep faith in its partnership with OpenAI. Three days later, Altman was reinstated, under a new board. “It was difficult times for them, but our bond and relationship is even stronger,” Cai says. Rakuten was not alone in standing firm behind OpenAI’s business, despite ructions at the top of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-up. In December, OpenAI’s revenues surpassed $2bn on an annualised basis, making it one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history. Since the launch of its viral chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI has built up a business that is among a handful of Silicon Valley companies, including Google and Meta, to have posted revenues of $1bn within a decade of being founded. The Microsoft-backed company believes it can more than double its yearly run rate — a measure of the most recent month’s revenue, multiplied by 12 — in 2025. The company’s enterprise tools, built on generative AI models that are capable of producing text, code and images, have been bought by finance, media and technology giants ranging from Morgan Stanley to Axel Springer, Salesforce and Rakuten. According to Altman, 92 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use OpenAI products, which include ChatGPT and its underlying AI model GPT-4, while ChatGPT has 100mn weekly users. While the company has accelerated the pace of its sales growth in the past year, its valuation has also risen exponentially from roughly $29bn last April to $86bn in October, premised on its future moneymaking potential. Investors are betting that consumer and business interest in generative AI will continue to climb in the coming year, as people are eager to experiment with the technology.
Full commentary : A look at OpenAI’s business model, as the company works to more than double its yearly run rate by 2025; ChatGPT Enterprise now has 300+ paying customers.
