Last week ChatGPT turned 2 years old, while the number of people using the chatbot weekly has already reached 250 million.
At the same time, OpenAI’s plans for the development of ChatGPT are even more ambitious—the company is betting on a set of new products, building its own data centers, and an important partnership with Apple to reach a billion (!) users next year (effectively, every eighth person on Earth).
“By 2025, we will become a research lab that serves millions of people… with hopes for a billion worldwide,” said OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar in a comment to Financial Times.
A startup founded 9 years ago, aims to transform into a commercial tech giant (despite Elon Musk’s opposition). Currently, OpenAI has attracted $6 billion in investments and is valued at $150 billion—the highest mark for startups in Silicon Valley’s history.
At the same time, the financial metrics of the company are far from ideal—according to people close to OpenAI, the startup spends over $5 billion a year and is still far from being profitable. A new team that came after the departure of key leaders such as Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, and has the necessary experience in monetizing consumer products.
The new recruits are supposedly still driven by OpenAI’s “mission” to create and distribute artificial general intelligence—software with cognitive abilities surpassing human ones—but they are tasked with deploying useful applications in the real world in the near future.
In this case, it’s again about so-called “AI agents”—programs that will perform tasks on the Internet as directed by people, such as booking tickets.
“Agent should become the word of the year… It could be a researcher, a useful assistant for ordinary people, working moms like me. In 2025, we will see the first very successful agents helping people every day,” adds Friar.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s competitors, including Google, Anthropic, and Microsoft, have also signaled their intentions to launch their own AI agents within the next year.
“Today, OpenAI already has several hundred million active users without any marketing expenses,” said one of the startup’s investors. “Apple has 2 billion iPhone users worldwide and wants to push a new phone with artificial intelligence. The path to gaining 1 billion users with ChatGPT in their pocket is not so far-fetched.”
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