The Rise and Rise of OpenAI: Company ‘Reaches $2bn Revenue’

Within five days of OpenAI releasing ChatGPT to the public on 30th November 2022 it had attracted over one million users. One year on and the hype hasn’t died down. 

Now, according to a report by the Financial Times, the company has reached the $2bn revenue milestone, with investors having previously valued the San Francisco-based startup at more than US$80bn.

Citing two people with knowledge of OpenAI’s finances, the FT reports that the company believes it can more than double this revenue figure in 2025 as the company continues to lead the way in the world of generative AI (Gen AI).

OpenAI: ChatGPT launch has rapidly accelerated interest in Gen AI

Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other investors announced the formation of OpenAI in October 2015. In June 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on trillions of words from the Internet. The company also announced that an associated API, named simply ‘the API’, would form the heart of its first commercial product. 

The company’s release of ChatGPT in late 2022 has rapidly accelerated interest in Gen AI, with the tool capable of interacting conversationally, answering follow-up questions, admitting its mistakes, challenging incorrect premises, and rejecting inappropriate requests. 

Following previous investments in 2019 and 2021, in January 2023 Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, intended to accelerate AI breakthroughs.

The agreement extended the two companies' ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research.

In March 2023 OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4, the latest iteration in its deep learning model, which it says ‘exhibits human-level performance’ on various professional and academic benchmarks from the US bar exam to SAT school exams.

With a rapid rise in demand, prompted by the launch of ChatGPT, leading to a global shortage of AI chips, OpenAI has reportedly exploring building its own AI chips.

“OpenAI’s potential move into hardware and building its own AI chips comes as no surprise,” Alex White, GM EMEA at Softbank-backed AI startup SambaNova Systems, told Technology Magazine. “OpenAI is trying to reinvent itself as an enterprise business, and that requires the ability to be able to fine tune or build bespoke large language models - and we all know that training models requires vastly more compute power than running the models.”

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