The limelight is in full swingOpenAIHow much money can you earn this year?
Ultraman first gave the employees a sneak peek.
Annual revenue reached$1.3 billion(Equivalent to nearly RMB 9.5 billion).
This is another "revision" of OpenAI's annualized revenue figures.
In June, it was estimated that OpenAI’s revenue this year would reach$200 million, which shocked the technology circle at the time. You should know that OpenAI only earned 28 million US dollars last year.
But it's still conservative.
At the end of August, The Information believed that OpenAI's revenue would exceed $1 billion in the next 12 months.
The latest news about Ultraman confirms this analysis. It also indirectly reveals a fact:OpenAI now has more than $100 million in revenue per month(Equivalent to approximately RMB 700 million).
In comparison, its closest competitor, Anthroic, has annualized revenue of $100 million.
It seems that when some netizens analyzed in February that OpenAI's monthly revenue could be comparable to that of Honor of Kings, they were not joking.
01 Revenue surges and services are cheap
So the question is, where does OpenAI's surging revenue come from?
The most obvious one is of course the revenue brought by ChatGPT Plus.
Another major aspect is Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service.
In January this year, Microsoft announced that Azure Global Edition enterprise customers can directly call OpenAI models on the cloud platform, including GPT-4, CodeX and Dall-E. It is not yet known what proportion of OpenAI's revenue will be generated from this.
However, while OpenAI's revenue figures continue to set new records,The outside world's concerns have not diminished at all, there are also voices that believe OpenAI may collapse.
The main reason is that all disclosed data only talk about revenue but not profits.
Some people speculate that they may not have made any money yet.
But it is not difficult to achieve profitability, after all, software services are growing so fast.
In addition, there has been news recently.Even Microsoft hasn’t made any money from this big model trend..
GitHub Copilot, an AI programming tool with 1.5 million users, loses an average of $20 per user per month, with a maximum of $80.
To put it in perspective, since Microsoft launched Copilot, it has lost as much as $30 million on it in just one month, and the loss has exceeded 100 million in a year.
And compared with other companies, OpenAI's service is stillCheapThat one.
Someone calculated that it costs $4-12 to fine-tune their team's own project on GPT-3.5 once, and it takes about 1-1.5 hours to fine-tune 1 million tokens.
On Amazon Web Services (AWS), a single p4d.24xlarge costs $32.77 per hour, or $19.22 for a one-year subscription.
If OpenAI's GPT-3.5 fine-tuning only uses 8 GPUs, then by comparison, the price of using p4d.24xlarge on AWS is about the same as OpenAI's3-8 times.
It’s not hard to understand why some people are starting to worry.
But from another perspective, this may also be part of OpenAI's strategy.
Someone gave a pertinent analysis:OpenAI is cheap because it has to be cheap now so it can quickly capture the market.
The winner in this AI race will not be the company with the most advanced technology, but the company that can provide an excellent user experience, gain public awareness, and have a product moat.
And since the beginning of this year, OpenAI has made a lot of money, and CEO Ultraman has also demonstrated outstanding "money-making ability."
In January this year, Microsoft invested another $10 billion in OpenAI; in April, OpenAI received over $300 million in financing.
Now OpenAI's latest valuation is likely to reach$80-90 billion.
The company is reportedly organizing a tender offer that would give outside investors the opportunity to buy shares from some employees, the second such tender offer OpenAI has held this year.
This is not what Altman expected. According to people familiar with the matter, he has hinted that OpenAI will try to raise $100 billion in the next few years. The market expects OpenAI to raise another large round of funds as early as this year.
Some people say that OpenAI's dominance in the field of AI today is not only due to its technological leadership, but also to its rapid financial growth.
Reference Links:
[1]https://readwrite.com/openais-financial-ascent-from-28-million-to-1-3-billion-in-yearly-revenue/
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37860819
[3]https://twitter.com/binarybits/status/1712488613844246787
[4]https://twitter.com/dotey/status/1712657913284587556