The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her emails and Slack messages.
Friar and other company executives are banking OpenAI’s future on more of the latter as it shifts its focus to business-oriented products while shedding some of its consumer offerings as a pathway to profitability.
OpenAI says it will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for “high-value professional work” as the company faces heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to adopt AI assistants in their workplaces.
“You’ll see a new model coming from us in short order. We feel very excited about it,” Friar said in an interview with The Associated Press.
OpenAI boasts of more than 900 million weekly users of its core ChatGPT product, and Friar said about 95% of them “don’t pay anything” for the popular chatbot. But while all those interactions build habits and reliance, they also strain the costly computing resources needed to power the company’s AI systems and highlight the need for big business customers to help pay the bills.
OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic, valued at $380 billion, both lose more money than they make, putting the privately owned San Francisco-based AI research laboratories in a fierce competition to generate more revenue as they race toward becoming publicly traded on Wall Street.
The Associated Press has the full story.
