ChatGPT costs OpenAI $700,000 a day. If Sam Altman’s company doesn’t make money soon,
Microsoft and other new investors may stop covering these costs. Data analysis The India Journal reported that the company could go bankrupt by 2024.
Microsoft’s $10 billion investment might be able to save OpenAI. “But on the other hand, OpenAI expected to make $200 million a year in 2023 and $1 billion in 2024, which seems like a long shot since the company is still losing money,” the report said, noting that in May of this year, OpenAI’s losses doubled to $540 million since it started developing ChatGPT.
The post stated that OpenAI had been profitable for years despite CEO Sam Altman’s lack of ownership.
Additionally, the report discussed how fewer people are visiting the ChatGPT website. According to SimilarWeb data, the generative AI chatbot had 1.7 billion user visits in June and 1.5 billion in July, after reaching a record high of 1.9 billion in May 2023.
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More on the report on ChatGPT
The account also mentioned a user on X (which used to be Twitter) who said that API competition could be a big reason why fewer people are going to the ChatGPT website. Most companies do not let their employees use the generative AI chatbot for work, but they do let them use the API to use the large language model (LLM) in other processes.
But Analytics India Magazine said, “It is a bit arrogant of OpenAI to think that the drop in users is just because people have started using the API to build their own products.” The trick here is the rise of open-source LLM models, which is interesting. In partnership with Microsoft, Meta’s Llama 2 is letting people use the model for business.
“So, why wouldn’t people choose an easy-to-change Llama 2 instead of what OpenAI offers, which is a paid, proprietary, and limited version?”
The lack of graphics processing units (GPUs) is another problem for the company. Altman had already pointed out that the lack of GPUs on the market made it harder for the business to improve and make new models. Earlier, the media said that the company had applied to trademark “GPT-5,” which shows that the company wants to keep teaching models.
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Elon Musk, who is building a competing robot, would also be a threat to ChatGPT. “It’s interesting that a lot of people found his idea to build a “TruthGPT,” which is not as politically biased as ChatGPT, to be interesting,” the report said.
To get ahead, Elon Musk bought 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs. On the bright side, OpenAI’s switch to a paid version may have brought in a lot of money, but “the financial numbers are still unclear.”
Even so, if this company focuses on LLM and goes public, bigger companies may buy it out. According to Business Standard, the story also said that this could be one way for investors to get their money back.