OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain 32
An anonymous reader shares a report: For two years, ChatGPT has been OpenAI's cash cow. But by the end of the decade, the company has told some potential and current investors it expects combined sales from agents and other new products to exceed its popular chatbot, lifting total sales to $125 billion in 2029 and $174 billion the next year, according to documents seen by The Information.
The projections, which would propel the 10-year-old startup's sales toward the level of Nvidia or Meta Platforms today, reflect rapid revenue gains from agents, or AI software that can take actions on behalf of customers, as well as other new products. These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.
The projections, which would propel the 10-year-old startup's sales toward the level of Nvidia or Meta Platforms today, reflect rapid revenue gains from agents, or AI software that can take actions on behalf of customers, as well as other new products. These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.
The bigger they are ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... the harder they fall. What a colossal waste of money.
This is replacing billions of dollars (Score:2)
Automation is what this is it's just automating White collar jobs. We spent the last 50 years automating Blue collar jobs and it took out 70% of
Re: (Score:2)
I think AI will replace perhaps 5% of mid/back office jobs by 2030, particularly accounting, analytics, and accelerating from there. Every small and mid sized company will still need a skeleton crew of human accountants and analytics folks, but the 2000 accountants at microsoft or other large corporations should definitely be looking over their shoulders right now. Software engineering, eh, I think we have some work to do on effective context length, "context length" is over a million tokens in some adverti
dwarfed by blockchain (Score:2)
I wouldn't invest in these numbers (Score:2)
The revenue now is 12billion. Yeah they aren't monetizing free users. There are lots of competitors and most people don't need premium services. The accuracy isn't good enough for me to pay money. I might pay 10-20$ month, but there will always be the free services, so I'll just switch to those.
Re:I wouldn't invest in these numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
The revenue now is 12billion. Yeah they aren't monetizing free users. There are lots of competitors and most people don't need premium services. The accuracy isn't good enough for me to pay money. I might pay 10-20$ month, but there will always be the free services, so I'll just switch to those.
Monetizing free users could be figuring out how to shove ads into the AI. Imagine if every answer includes a "sponsored by" byline. Or, more horrifying, they just slip in corporate sponsored answers whether they're appropriate or not, like Google does on their search engine.
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And for most people these options will be good enough. Like most open source solutions
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The revenue now is 12billion. Yeah they aren't monetizing free users. There are lots of competitors and most people don't need premium services. The accuracy isn't good enough for me to pay money. I might pay 10-20$ month, but there will always be the free services, so I'll just switch to those.
There are two key questions to future growth projections for any company: (1) future growth of the total addressable market (TAM) and (2) competitive projections and moats.
There is a wide range of views about TAM growth. Regardless, the real issue is the competitive landscape. What is it that will give OpenAI a competitive moat? The indicated growth rate doesn't happen with an overwhelming competitive moat. Why is Nvidia so impressive? Because after 5-10 years of many competitors trying to compete, in
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...future growth of the total addressable market....
Is that a 32-bit market, or a 64-bit one? That will determine the growth potential.
nonpaying users (Score:2)
Where was the link to the site this report came from?
Anyways;
'These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.'
I'm curious to know how OpenAI plans to make this money. Will they force ads somehow on those users? Sell data about their interactions with the AI? Or worse, will they steer those users in directions that are beneficial to someone who will pay for it?
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Last I heard, OpenAI is still losing money on even their Pro plan users, with a burn rate of $5 billion+/year. If they forecast $125 billion in revenue by 2029, I would expect their actual profit/loss for the year to be on the order of negative $300 billion.
Re: nonpaying users (Score:2)
This is the correct analysis. They still lose money on everything they do, and need all the world's money and resources to continue.
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When it requires burning this much money to compete, there won't be a lot of competition. So all the competitors can just be their customers.
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Where was the link to the site this report came from?
Anyways; 'These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.'
I'm curious to know how OpenAI plans to make this money. Will they force ads somehow on those users?
Yes.
Sell data about their interactions with the AI?
HELL yes.
Or worse, will they steer those users in directions that are beneficial to someone who will pay for it?
Yes, though on the surface that won't appear to be that different from option number 1.
Perhaps (Score:4, Insightful)
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The thing is, after having attended many exuberant presentations about future forecasts which turned out to be based on little more than wishful thinking disguised as pretty diagrams, pictures, buzzwords, and whatnot, I would be surprised if this one is the exception.
Did you get this one? "Climb on board and use AI all day every day or you will get left behind!" Of course, they fail to mention that the main reason they need you aboard is so that they can gather training data from your usage. Or just data in general.
And the lies get bigger (Score:2)
AFAIK, they do not even turn a profit at this time. All they have to keep them afloat is more and more stupid money.
Did ChatGPT calculate that number? (Score:2)
Yes... (Score:2)
They want to be a monopoly (Score:3)
I'd pay for it (Score:2)
The last thing I was doing before coming to Slashdot was generating an image of my pet dog with Winnie the Pooh for a bedtime story tonight. It's not a high value use of AI, but I would definitely pay a subscription to keep my access, especially if they'll keep generating things that are obviously plagiarizing a copyrighted work (Disney's version of Winnie the Pooh).
Investorbabble (Score:4, Insightful)
This is chum for investors.
We shouldn't be surprised (Score:2)
LLMs are nothing but bullshit generators, so we shouldn't expect the companies that make them to be much else.
( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Farti... [springer.com] )
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It's always astounding there are people on slashdot saying stuff like this. Guess it comes down to one or more of the following
1. They don't understand the technology - usually see people comparing LLMs to Markov generators and the like
2. They've never used the technology or seen demonstrations by third parties
3. They're unable to consider uses. Even if you can only imagine LLMs being bullshit generators, there's a huge demand for bullshit of different types.
4. They're afraid of the technology and don't w
Re: We shouldn't be surprised (Score:1)
Kinda Silly... potentially past the singularity (Score:1)
You really can't project anything past the singularity and since some people are projecting ASI by 2027 we just do not know if there will even be an "economy" in the traditional sense of the word.
Embodied dumb AGI is already destroying many jobs. We have a likely recession in the near future. Amazon could shed 90% of its employees by 2029. And they are not likely to find new jobs.
Enough suckers still buying their scam (Score:2)
with promises that an all mighty AI overload will be in reach within the next few years.
A lot of BS in that forecast..... (Score:2)