While OpenAI was banking on its ChatGPT Pro plan launched on December 5 to finally reap some profits, its CEO, Sam Altman concedes on X that the company finds itself facing an unexpected situation: subscribers use the service much more intensively than planned, which makes him lose money.
A situation which is not new for OpenAI: the success of ChatGPT launched at the end of November 2022 caused it to record a loss of 3 million dollars the following December. Nevertheless optimistic, it hoped to achieve a turnover of 200 million dollars in 2023 and was targeting a billion dollars in 2024. Its forecasts were largely exceeded since its turnover in 2024 was 3.7 billion dollars, but it had not anticipated a loss of $5 billion due to operating costs, most of which were computational costs.
Sam Altman, in his series of posts on , endowed with advanced reasoning skills. “I thought it would make us money.”, he writes, a decision which did not produce the expected results, quite the contrary, recalling the complexity of maintaining AI on a large scale while aiming for profitability.
In a blog published the same day, he shares his thoughts on the past two years since the launch of ChatGPT and the business built around the technology:
“Building a business at such high speed with so little training is a messy process. It’s often two steps forward, one step back (and sometimes, one step forward and two steps back). Mistakes are corrected as you go, but there aren’t really any manuals or guideposts when you’re doing original work. Moving at high speed through unfamiliar waters is an incredible experience, but it’s also extremely stressful for all players. Conflicts and misunderstandings abound.”
He adds:
“We are now confident that we know how to build AGI (artificial general intelligence) as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that in 2025 we could see the first AI agents “joining the world of work” and materially changing business production.”
But OpenAI’s ambition, ultimately, is to build super-intelligence capable of transforming the world. “Given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company,” concludes Sam Altman.
