OpenAI's 75% of revenue comes from paying consumers: CFO Sarah Friar

By Shirin Ghaffary and Ed Ludlow 

OpenAI generates the vast majority of its revenue from consumers who pay for its products, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said, even as the artificial intelligence startup competes in a crowded market to sign up more corporate customers. 

In an interview with Bloomberg TV on Monday, Friar said that roughly 75 per cent of OpenAI’s business comes from consumer subscriptions. The company’s paid consumer plan for its chatbot ChatGPT currently starts at $20 per month.

 

“We have been wowed at just the pace of growth, particularly on the consumer side,” Friar told Bloomberg TV’s Ed Ludlow at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. “Even our enterprise businesses, they are young, but they are already doing an incredible amount of annualized revenue. We’re really excited by the potential there.” 

Like other AI companies, OpenAI has been working to grow revenue by appealing to business users. OpenAI said in September that it hit 1 million paid users for corporate versions of ChatGPT. That includes people signed up to use its ChatGPT Team and Enterprise services, which are aimed at companies, as well as those at universities using its ChatGPT Edu product. 

 

 

But Friar’s remarks hint at the strength of OpenAI’s consumer business. Friar said ChatGPT currently has 250 million weekly active users, and that the company is converting free users to the paid product at a rate of 5 per cent to 6 per cent.

 

While the company is growing revenue quickly, it also has significant expenses from developing and operating ever more advanced AI systems. Earlier this month, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion fundraising round and tapped global banks for a $4 billion revolving line of credit. 

 

“What’s most important to us is to stay on the frontier: building the frontier models, making sure that we are bringing, ultimately, AGI to the benefit of humanity,” Friar said, referring to artificial general intelligence, or AI that can match or outperform humans on many intellectual tasks. 

As part of that effort, OpenAI has been working to form a global coalition to support investing in the physical infrastructure needed to power AI. That includes advocating for an unprecedented data center build-out in the US, with facilities that can generate as much as 5 gigawatts. 

 

“It’s new territory,” Friar said of the company’s infrastructure plans. “Frankly, I think we’re all learning in this space: Infrastructure is destiny.”