AI Roundup 030: OpenAI's $1B revenue
September 1, 2023
OpenAI's $1B revenue
Reporting this week suggests that OpenAI is on track to generate over $1 billion in revenue over the next twelve months. That number is much, much higher than any other previously released metrics.
Why it matters:
Everyone agrees that foundation models constitute a major breakthrough, but how they will make money has been unclear. So far, the only clear winner has been Nvidia.
But the hype around ChatGPT is already starting to wane. Millions may be paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus, but Bard, Claude, and plenty of other free assistants are trying to take market share.
So this week, OpenAI shared how they plan to go after even larger revenue streams - ChatGPT Enterprise.
A closer look at ChatGPT Enterprise:
Privacy, security, and deployment tools. Admins can control user permissions and there is a heavy emphasis that your data is not used to train future models.
Unlimited GPT-4. Unlike ChatGPT Plus, there are no usage caps for GPT-4, and the model apparently performs up to 2x faster.
Model customization. While not yet available, OpenAI is already discussing the ability to “connect the apps you already use.” Presumably, this will extend to fine-tuning models as well.
Thank u, Cloud Next
Google's Cloud Next event was this week; if you're not familiar, it's an annual conference focused solely on Google Cloud. And like Google I/O before it, there was a smorgasbord of generative AI announcements.
All the announcements I could find:
Duet AI for Workspace will cost $30/month/user for enterprises.
Duet AI for Google Chat(Google's Slack competitor).
Duet AI for Meet will be able to go to meetings for you.
Duet AI for Google Cloud aims to write code and surface insights.
Duet AI for Mandiant Threat Intelligence aims to upgrade cybersecurity.
SynthID, a tool to embed invisible "watermarks" into AI images.
Llama and Claude are coming to Google Cloud.
AlloyDB AI, generative AI capabilities built into AlloyDB for developers.
Vertex AI improvements to better complete with Azure and AWS.
The 5th generation of TPUs (Tensor Processing Units).
The A3 GPU supercomputer will be available next month.
GM's OnStar will handle simple calls with chatbots.
Elsewhere in the FAANG free-for-all:
Meta releases FACET, an AI tool for evaluating the “fairness” of AI detection models, and CoTracker, a model for tracking moving pixels in a video.
The tech giant also updated its policies for users to opt out of having their personal data used to train its models.
And Snap rolled out Dreams, their version of the AI selfie feature that Lensa popularized.
Request for comment
Starting Thursday, the US Copyright Office is opening a public comment period on AI and copyright issues.
Between the lines:
If you haven’t been paying attention, AI copyright issues are kind of a big deal.
The agency wants to answer three main questions: copyrighted training data usage, whether AI-only works can be copyrighted, and how copyright liability works with AI.
Any new rules will likely impact ongoing lawsuits, like the ones OpenAI moved to have dismissed this week.
Elsewhere in AI geopolitics:
Senator Chuck Schumer is hosting an AI Insight Forum later this month. Top tech and AI CEOs are expected to attend.
After finalizing its rules for generative AI companies, China has approved the first batch of generative AI products for public consumption.
And the UK is launching ARIA, a DARPA-like program tasked with working on AI breakthroughs.
Things happen
Autonomous drones beat human champions in drone races. Call of Duty is testing AI voice moderation. Samsung's Food, an AI-powered recipe app. DoorDash launches AI voice ordering features for restaurants. The US Air Force's efforts to build an AI air combat system. LLM's are impacting research on AI humor. Stephen King on his books being used for AI training. A look at Smallville, the virtual village populated by AI chatbots. a16z's open-source AI grants. “Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’.” Local news outlet pausing AI coverage after terrible sports reporting. OpenAI's ChatGPT guide for teachers. The UAE’s Arabic large language model. Understanding Llama 2 and Code Llama.
