Is the growth momentum of OpenAI unstoppable? Maintaining Growth Faces Internal and External Challenges

On October 17th, it was announced that next month will be the first anniversary of ChatGPT's release. It can be said that since then, it has brought unstoppable growth momentum to OpenAI

On October 17th, it was announced that next month will be the first anniversary of ChatGPT's release. It can be said that since then, it has brought unstoppable growth momentum to OpenAI.

This year, this AI chat robot has been a great success. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in a communication with employees last week that the company expects annual revenue to reach approximately $1.3 billion.

This achievement is remarkable: OpenAI's total revenue in 2022 was only $28 million. Almost 50 times revenue growth is a dream for any Silicon Valley startup.

ChatGPT is promoted as a superpower that can benefit both novice programmers attempting to quickly process JavaScript code and marketers planning creative activities. It is not surprising that OpenAI has achieved such rapid growth.

But now, a difficult moment has arrived.

Despite its alliance with the recovering Microsoft, OpenAI faces multiple threats and must be taken seriously to maintain its rapid growth momentum.

Firstly, there are external challenges: OpenAI needs to maintain its own "moat", which is facing the threat of shrinking.

A moat is a common strategy adopted by technology companies to prevent competitors. In fact, these companies establish strong moats by developing products that are difficult to replicate.

Although OpenAI gained a first mover advantage by launching the highly anticipated consumer oriented application ChatGPT, competitors are also busy investing resources in developing their own versions, which may gradually erode OpenAI's moat.

Google is one of the biggest threats faced by OpenAI. This search giant is about to launch the highly anticipated multimodal AI model Gemini, aimed at competing with ChatGPT's basic model GPT-4, and is expected to be released this year.

At the same time, the open source community is also busy developing an alternative AI model. The goal is to replicate the performance of commercial tools such as ChatGPT through one's own version and provide it to users for free.

If Gemini or an open source version similar to GPT-4 can achieve or surpass its performance, OpenAI may face a difficult struggle to maintain a paid premium service user base.

As for the new features such as "see, listen, and speak" in ChatGPT, there is currently no consensus, and it is unclear whether users see them as an important factor in changing game rules or just fancy gimmicks.

Another key challenge faced by OpenAI seems to come from itself.

Previously, analysts reported that OpenAI made a quiet modification to the "Core Values" section of its recruitment page, removing the words "thoughtful" and emphasizing the importance of "AGI focus" and "intense and aggressive".

Although these changes may seem like minor adjustments in semantics, as startups are usually proactive and motivated, this intentional language shift is a worrying signal for OpenAI's priorities.

For regulatory agencies, this may mean that the ethical issues of AI development have decreased by one or two levels in priority. Given that lawmakers around the world have called for caution in the development of AI this year, this situation may not receive much response.

This issue may reach its climax next month, as world leaders will hold their first AI security summit in the UK. Putting safety issues on the back burner may prove foolish. (Small)