OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, recently surpassed $1.6 billion in annualized revenue, two people familiar with the figure said. Information.
The total indicates monthly income of 133 million dollars.
The figure represents a 20% increase from $1.3 billion in annualized revenue. The information reported starting in mid-October. In August, OpenAI was on track to generate $1 billion in annualized revenue.
OpenAI earned a total of $28 million in revenue in 2022.
Related: New York Times slaps Microsoft and ChatGPT maker with copyright lawsuit
The revenue increase was led by sustained growth of OpenAI's popular ChatGPT product, which as of November had a weekly user base of around 100 million people, according to CEO Sam Altman.
The company also offers a subscription service called ChatGPT Plus, which gives users a more powerful version of the chatbot for $20 a month.
Tumultuous November on ChatGPT
ChatGPT's continued growth came in the wake of a tumultuous November for OpenAI, marked by the sudden ouster (and then reinstatement) of Altman, the company's co-founder and CEO.
Although it began as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, OpenAI reorganized into a hybrid “limited profit” model in 2019, where the business is controlled by a small nonprofit board.
The San Francisco company was structured in such a way that the nonprofit board was required to fulfill the company's mission of safely developing artificial general intelligence, rather than its shareholders.
The board, saying that Altman had not been “consistently truthful” in his communications with them, removed him on November 17. Part of Altman's reinstatement involved installing a new group of directors, including representation from investor Microsoft. (MSFT) – Get a free report.
Microsoft has invested around $13 billion in OpenAI.
Revenue figures suggest that OpenAI's enterprise customers, which in August included cosmetics giant Estée Lauder (HE) – Get a free reportNeither the graphic design platform Canva nor the consulting firm PwC were scared by the November drama.
The Information reported that some members of OpenAI's leadership believe that figure could exceed $5 billion by the end of 2024.
Bloomberg reported in December that OpenAI was raising new funding at a valuation of $100 billion.
Related: Human creativity persists in the era of generative ai
Generative ai and copyright issues
Even as its business prospects continue to strengthen, OpenAI has been embroiled in several copyright infringement lawsuits.
Last week, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging rampant copyright infringement in both ChatGPT's training and the output produced by the model.
The Times complaint calls for the destruction of all models trained on Times content, which could deal a blow to the generative ai industry.
It's not just text either. artificial intelligence researcher and expert Gary Marcus, citing numerous examples of copyright-infringing production, said December 29 that generative ai systems like ChatGPT have been trained with copyrighted content, and that the companies behind these models have not been transparent about what their models are trained on.
David Holz, the creator of Midjourney, an ai platform for image rendering, ai-on-art-imagination-and-the-creative-economy/?sh=7ec96cbf2d2b”>said in September that the company never sought the artists' consent to use copyrighted works in training its models.
He said there's “really no way” to access a hundred million images and “know where they come from.”
“If OpenAI collapses, WeWork-style, it will probably be seen as a story of arrogance,” Marcus saying. “They knew the violation was going to be a big problem. They proceeded anyway. That's not going to play well in front of jurors. In the end, it could eat them up.”
Contact Ian with ai stories by email, [email protected] or Signal at 732-804-1223.
Related: Midjourney text-to-image site users claim to have problems with new update
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