OpenAI Is a Once-in-a-lifetime Startup

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Unprecedented doesn’t quite cut it. Unhinged is directionally accurate, but still a little casual.

There has never, ever been a company like OpenAI: in growth and, yes, hubris. This week’s funding announcement—$40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation—is the largest ever capital raise by a private company. But what makes San Francisco’s brightest star so unusual is that all of their success and all of their funding isn’t even close enough to get them to where they want to go.

Consider this: If you mark ChatGPT’s launch as the start of its commercial activity, OpenAI, in two short years, has added more revenue and users than Google, Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook did in their first two years combined. Yes, the company had an incubation period where it mostly focused on research, but its truly mercantile energy didn’t emerge until that launch. (Yes, the company had an incubation period where it mostly focused on research, but its truly mercantile energy didn’t emerge till that launch.) The company currently boasts 500 million weekly active users, recently added a million users in an hour, and has already hit 20 million paying subscribers. Internal revenue projections have the company’s annual earnings growing to $12.7 billion—just three years after ChatGPT’s launch. Yet, to achieve this astonishing growth rate, OpenAI is expected to lose $5 billion dollars this year.

Though public companies routinely add this type of revenue annually, it's unheard of for startups to hit such milestones so early. And it's even more astounding considering OpenAI is simultaneously driving cutting-edge AI research. Every few months, the company announces something astonishing—its new image generation model being just the latest example.

Yes, competitors at Google, Anthropic, and elsewhere rapidly match OpenAI’s capabilities. And yes, OpenAI has leveraged earlier research from these very peers. But the speed, audacity, and cross-domain success of OpenAI make it singular. It is one of the best AI research labs that is also one of the best consumer companies that is also one of the best B2B SaaS companies. Silicon Valley archetypes normally exist separately; OpenAI embodies them all at once, and in ways we've never seen.

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• How OpenAI has become a cultural force as well as technological one
• Why a company like this is so rare
• What it will take for OpenAI to deliver on its promise