According to technology media The Information on September 13, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told employees in an internal message that ChatGPT currently has 10 million paid subscribers , and another 1 million users have participated in the more expensive enterprise team subscription plan.
OpenAI has never disclosed these data before. Based on these data and OpenAI's public subscription prices, it is conservatively estimated that ChatGPT can generate more than $225 million in revenue for OpenAI per month (annualized revenue of $2.7 billion) . Customers mainly use this product to generate code, help write or edit text, and conduct other general research.
If OpenAI's API services are included, the company could generate about $4 billion in revenue in the next year , up from about $3.4 billion in annualized revenue around June of this year. An OpenAI spokesman declined to comment on the figures.
In March of this year, OpenAI's API business was already bringing in $83 million in revenue per month (or $1 billion annualized). At the time, they were selling APIs to fintech companies Stripe and Morgan Stanley to help detect fraud or automate customer service. Since then, this part of the business has been growing .
ChatGPT is less than two years old, but its subscriber base and revenue have grown rapidly, making it one of the few software products to achieve such scale in such a short period of time. OpenAI's revenue in "conversational AI" is seen as a barometer of business people's demand for AI , and their revenue in this field dwarfs that of competitors such as Google and Anthropic.
But rapid growth comes at a high price. Currently, OpenAI provides ChatGPT to hundreds of millions of people for free, while also developing new products, which means extremely high computing costs, and OpenAI still loses billions of dollars each year .
To address this, OpenAI is in talks with investors, including a fund backed by the United Arab Emirates, to raise up to $7 billion in a new round of funding, and is trying to change its corporate structure from a nonprofit to a for-profit model that is popular with investors.
At a proposed valuation of $150 billion, the deal would value OpenAI at about 37.5 times its forward revenue , which is relatively low compared to many other AI developers but almost twice that of AI chip designer Nvidia . The proposed OpenAI valuation multiple does not take into account its high cash burn, although its high revenue growth rate could offset concerns about this issue.
To access OpenAI's most advanced AI models through ChatGPT, individuals need to pay $20 per month. Enterprise team subscriptions start at $25 per person per month, with features such as custom models and generated AI images, and subscriptions for features such as analytics and more customer support can cost more than $50 per month.
As Apple begins handing off complex queries that Siri can’t handle to ChatGPT, free usage of the chatbot may soon surge. Today, OpenAI released the o1-preview of its long-awaited “Strawberry” reasoning AI model, which, although it will first be available to paid subscribers, may generate more ChatGPT usage.
Growing costs are one reason OpenAI is considering additional ways to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hinted in interviews that he generally doesn't like selling ads. But earlier this year, OpenAI hired a Google search advertising veteran.
The use of ChatGPT is somewhat similar to how people use traditional search engines such as Google, which generate revenue through advertising. OpenAI is also developing a search engine that can also answer queries that require visual capabilities, local life and shopping-related answers. A small number of users are testing the service.
Source: The Information
This article comes from the WeChat public account "Smart Things" (ID: zhidxcom) , translated by Chen Junda, edited by Panke, and published by 36Kr with authorization.
