Key takeaways
- OpenAI anticipates revenue will triple to $12.7 billion this year amid surging demand.
- The company faced high operational costs despite increased revenue projections for the next year.
- OpenAI is finalizing a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank with several prominent investors.
- ChatGPT’s capabilities are enhanced with new image generation features and expanded integration standards.
- CEO Sam Altman announced delayed rollout of new features due to unexpectedly high demand.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI is set to more than triple its revenue this year, reaching $12.7 billion, as demand surges, Bloomberg reported.
OpenAI, which made $3.7 billion last year, reportedly expects the revenue to more than double to $29.4 billion next year.
Despite soaring revenue, OpenAI is grappling with high operational costs, including expensive AI chips, data centre expenses, and top-tier talent acquisition.
Bloomberg also reported that OpenAI is close to finalising a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank Group Corp, with investors Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders Fund and Altimeter Capital Management in talks to participate.
At the same time, OpenAI is improving ChatGPT’s capabilities.
OpenAI on Tuesday announced GPT-4o’s native image generation, allowing users to upload and edit images, with plans to expand it to all ChatGPT tiers. By Wednesday, the feature was available only to Pro, Plus, and Teams subscribers. CEO Sam Altman later said the rollout to free users was delayed due to unexpectedly high demand.
The company also announced that it is adopting Anthropic’s AI integration standard. Announcing the move on X, Altman said, “People love MCP, and we are excited to add support across our products.” He added that it is currently available in the Agents SDK (software development kit), and support for the ChatGPT desktop app and responses API will come soon.
MCP is an open-source standard introduced by Anthropic to enable AI assistants, like Claude, to interact with external tools, data sources, and applications. Essentially, MCP allows large language models (LLMs) to fetch, process, and use external data in a structured and standardised way.
As Altman took to X to share more details on its MCP implementation in the coming months, Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger welcomed OpenAI’s adoption, calling MCP a “thriving open standard” with thousands of integrations.
