Comment on OpenAI's annualized revenue hits $10 billion, up from $5.5 billion in December 2024
EON_GuG@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Can someone tell me if this is bad, good or normal?
It’s…weird? Not normal.
Usually $10 billion worth of revenue has obvious products, services and outcomes it to point to.
That’s an unfathomable amount of money.
The first iPhone release completely transformed society within a few years…and earned about 1/10th that much revenue (6 million units at $700.00).
Thats less than 50 million GPT plus subscriptions, even fewer if you factor in the more expensive subscriptions. Thats alot of subscriptions, but not an implausible number.
Good point.
That would put OpenAI around #5 on this list (by estimates subscriber count): largest.org/…/largest-saas-businesses-by-number-o…
Less than Microsoft, Google, SalesForce and Zoom - but higher than Slack, DropBox, and Adobe Creative Cloud.
It’s surprising and rare for a relatively new company to jump that high in user base this quick.
It’s surprising, but it’s plausible. OpenAI and derived products do anecdotally seem about that popular, this year.
OpenAI reminds me in some ways of Netscape, except that it hasn’t gone public yet, compared to the latter, which did so only 16 months after its founding.
That’s a strange list. OpenAI doesn’t only offer SaaS for end users, it also offers API access which puts it into the infrastructure game with the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (which actually offers OpenAI services and pushes them out to Windows users en masse).
They also have an API, I think a chunk of that revenue comes from there. Think 3rd party apps and services having chat bots, writing assistants, etc that use openai’s API.
Do you think OpenAI could be falsifying data, laundering money, or is it just that investors are hyped about AI?
I assume that any venture backed company riding the crest of a hype wave is doing all three of those things. OpenAI is real and cool, but there are more conmen than vendor labeled USB drives at an average technology investment conference.
That said, others in this thread have pointed out that while it’s a surprising number, it’s not completely implausible, by any means.
Well, it’s surprising that OpenAI has that kind of revenue, considering that software companies in that nonprofit sector can’t achieve that kind of revenue. If we talk about other sectors like journalism, like the Associated Press, they can achieve that kind of revenue.
I agree that in technology, there are many scammers, but most fail and don’t make an impact. But then there are others who manage to continue and make an impact, like Builder.ai or Theranos. Then there are exceptional cases that do make a big impact, like Enron or WorldCom.
Well, we’ll have to see how their income evolves next year, as well as what their plan will be to transition from a non-profit to a PBC.
6 million units at $700 a pop is $4.2 billion in revenue. Much closer to 1/2 of $10 billion than you 1/10.
Apple has never made more money from the App Store than from iPhone hardware sales. When the iPhone launched the App Store didn’t exist yet. Over time, Apple’s revenue from services (including the App Store) has grown dramatically to around $26 billion per quarter today, though that is still less than what they earn in iPhone sales (a bit over $50 billion per quarter in 2024).
MrJgyFly@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They love pointing out their revenue instead of their profit. It they were truly making money, you’d think they’d refer to their profit instead.
anus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Revenue is a standard unit of measurement for any venture backed business because it gauges interest and growth better than profit does
MrJgyFly@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Does that run the risk of leading to a future collapse of certain businesses, especially if their expenses remain consistently astronomical like OpenAI? Please note I don’t actually know—not trying to be cheeky with this question. Genuinely curious.