In just three years, the American AI research company OpenAI has achieved remarkable results with its popular chatbot, ChatGPT, breaking through the $1 billion annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone. According to the latest data, OpenAI's ARR last year was about $5.5 billion, meaning an increase of nearly 80% this year. Such rapid development makes people marvel at the potential of the artificial intelligence market.

ARR is the expected annual income a company generates from subscription services or products, particularly useful for evaluating businesses operating on a subscription model (such as SaaS). It reflects the stable and periodic income a company derives from existing customers. A spokesperson for OpenAI revealed that this data not only includes revenue from consumer products and the commercial version of ChatGPT but also covers API sales, though it does not include licensing income from Microsoft or other large deals.

ChatGPT

Source of the image: The image was generated by AI, licensed by MidJourney service provider.

Additionally, OpenAI currently has 3 million paying commercial users, significantly up from 2 million in February. Analysts believe that this user growth also supports OpenAI's high valuation. Currently, OpenAI's valuation is approximately 30 times its revenue, indicating investors' optimistic expectations for its future growth.

In March this year, OpenAI completed a financing round worth $40 billion, which became the largest private technology financing case ever. Notably, Japan's SoftBank Group has replaced Microsoft as OpenAI's largest investor. Despite this, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman emphasized that Microsoft will continue to provide strong computing resources, and their cooperative relationship remains solid.

In terms of technical cooperation, Apple announced at the recent WWDC conference that it would integrate OpenAI's image generation function into its own Image Playground feature, where ChatGPT will help users adjust images. This move will further promote the application of OpenAI's technology in daily life.

Despite the challenges OpenAI faces in profitability—last year it lost about $5 billion—the company aims to achieve annual revenue of $125 billion by 2029. This requires more financial support and market expansion to achieve such astonishing growth rates.