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Can someone explain to me how OpenAI has billions in revenue. Almost no one I know outside of tech uses chatgpt with any regularity.
by apwell23 2y ago
Can someone explain to me how OpenAI has billions in revenue. Almost no one I know outside of tech uses chatgpt with any regularity.
- gcr 2y agoThey’ve got tons of B2B revenue from startups. VCs see it as speculative investments.
- minimaxir 2y agoEnterprise deals.
- apwell23 2y agoWhy are they paying for it if its not improving their profit ? I don't see any company mention profit gains from money they spent on chatgpt.
- minimaxir 2y agoBusiness expenses in the real world aren't always "only spend on things that directly increase profit." It's harder to quantify a productivity increase. The ROI of generative AI can be debated, but at the least the companies are locked into year+ enterprise contracts which is actualized revenue for OpenAI. Those contracts may or may not get renewed.
- cut3 2y agoReally? Everyone outside of tech that Ive talked to uses it. I have a new mail carrier and I was chatting with her and she mentioned that she used chatgpt to complete her job application for the carrier position.
- WithinReason 2y agoDid she pay for it?
- apwell23 2y agoyea mail person is not using with any regularity. So yea what i said still holds true for your anecdote.
- lm28469 2y ago> Everyone outside of tech that Ive talked to uses it. Uses != pays. I personally know only one person who pays for it, and dozen who use it for free
- erehweb 2y agoLots of people are using generative AI for roleplay - don't know if this is a significant contributor to OpenAI's revenue, but it's a (the?) major non-corporate use.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoDo you mean things like character.ai ? It seems they were successful, but not wildly so given that most of the researchers (incl. founder) just moved to Google, and character.ai plan to continue using off the shelf models. If the business had been growing very fast, I'd have thought that the founders would have stayed on for a larger pay day.
- svantana 2y agoWell, the number of people "in tech" worldwide is a hundred million or so. OpenAI reportedly has 11 million subscribers, presumably a lot of them are developers or similar. But I also know a bunch of people in advertising who uses chatgpt all the time.
- apwell23 2y ago> OpenAI reportedly has 11 million subscribers Spotify by comparision has 250 million paying subscribers and is currently valued at 75 billion. OpenAI is at 150 billion for 11 million subscribers ?
- Yizahi 2y agoIt's CEO is a god. Or at least will be soon. Of course everyone want to invest and have a share in a god's enterprise. PS: of course there is that small insignificant chance that he may be a false god, but that thought is heresy, so we don't say it usually.
- fragmede 2y agoFascinating! It's the other way around for me. Most of the tech people I talk about it with dismiss it as a stochastic parrot and very much don't trust it, and it's the non-tech people that rave about their new friend that knows and will explain everything.
- visarga 2y agoStochastic Parrot - a name that aged like milk. How can it be a parrot when it is doing few-shot and zero-shot tasks? Humans also make mistakes, and we're also using leaky abstractions to operate. We're "parroting" things we don't really understand. When we take a pill, we don't know what's inside. When we go to the doctor, we don't study medicine first. When we write an app, we don't know the minute details of the operating system or frameworks we use. As software developers we know the limits of abstraction and that no abstraction works everywhere. Our society is functional, not based on genuine understanding. Can't be any other way. There is no central understanding, not in the brain and not in society. Remember the parable of the Elephant and the blind men? That's us.
- fragmede 2y agoYeah. Every time Nvidia or OpenAI come up, and some one asks "where's their moat?" I giggle because that just makes me more convinced it's humans that are stochastic parrots, more than LLMs don't have something resembling intelligence. intelligent.
- apwell23 2y agoeverytime someone asks "where's their moat" some one giggles just makes me more convinced it's humans that are stochastic parrots.
- eesmith 2y ago> When we write an app Well there's one difference right there. When I sell my software I provide a warrantee and will refund if the software is not substantially functional, as described in the documentation and marketing. A couple of consulting jobs have also required that I carry insurance to cover possible restitution due to errors and omissions - because yes, I do make mistakes. As I understand it, the stochastic parrot providers require indemnification before you can use their products, so they are clearly held to a lower standard than humans.