OpenAI has a revenue problem

Its expenses are growing much faster than its revenues

OpenAI’s accountants struggling to reconcile its growing expenses with its revenues.

OpenAI has a problem. It is pursuing two goals, which initially appear complementary, but which actually conflict with each other. These two goals are: (1) establishing reliable, repeatable, and scalable revenue streams from enterprise customers, and (2) developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). While it may seem that these goals complement each other—large enterprises, after all, would benefit if AGI is developed—a closer examination suggests some problems brewing under the hood.

Let me be more specific here. Ask a CxO of a large enterprise—say Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Walmart, or Cox Enterprises—how she thinks AGI could help her business, and, sure, she’d say it would be great if a general intelligence could do a lot of the work that her employees presently do. But—large enterprises don’t actually care about the theoretical. They want an immediate use case for today’s technology. And, it’s just not clear that many large enterprises know how to use today’s AI to re-work their workflows. It is going to take large enterprises a number of years to figure out how to integrate AI into their workflows. And OpenAI doesn’t have the cash to finance multi-year explorations by prospective large customers.