OpenAI will Likely be a Trillion-Dollar Company in 2-3 Years

Chinese investor and serial entrepreneur Kai Fu Lee is bullish about OpenAI becoming a trillion-dollar company in the next two-three years. “OpenAI will likely be a trillion-dollar company in the not-too-distant future,” said Lee at a recent event with Fortune. 

“I am very bullish on OpenAI’s future. They've really done an admirable and unbelievable job. Even today, GPT-4 is a gold standard. You see, Gemini Ultra and Claude 3 make these claims, but if you use these models, GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo are unbelievably good and a great balance for, uh, performance and cost (sic),” he added. 

Further, he said that despite his concerns about their lack of openness, he greatly admires them. “If I could invest in any one of them (Microsoft, Google and OpenAI), which I can't, but if I could, it would be OpenAI,” he said.

In March last year, Lee launched 01.AI with the vision of developing a homegrown large language model for the Chinese market. Surprisingly, it has taken the open source route, unlike OpenAI, which is closed source. 

OpenAI recently released GPT-4o at its latest Spring Update event, which won hearts with its ‘omni’ capabilities across text, vision, and audio. OpenAI’s demos, which included a real-time translator, a coding assistant, an AI tutor, a friendly companion, a poet, and a singer, soon became the talk of the town.

OpenAI has made GPT-4o available to users for free. “We are a business and will find plenty of things to charge for, and that will help us provide free, outstanding AI service to (hopefully) billions of people,” said Altman. 

Altman said that they are yet to figure out ways to make an expensive technology like GPT-4 available to users for free. He emphasised that while they aim to provide advanced AI tools for free or at a minimal cost as part of their mission, the high expenses currently pose a significant barrier.

OpenAI reached the $2 billion revenue milestone in December, according to a report by the Financial Times. The report indicated that OpenAI expects to more than double this figure by 2025, driven by strong interest from business customers looking to implement generative AI tools in the workplace.