OpenAI has reportedly lost more than half a billion dollars over the past year due to the immense amount of computing power it takes to keep its generative AI chatbot, ‘ChatGPT,’ running. It is believed that OpenAI spends somewhere between $700,000 to $1 million daily on server expenses to manage ChatGPT’s millions of daily requests. This is causing the tech company’s losses to roughly double, according to estimates from analyst at SemiAnalysis.
In addition to these high daily costs, OpenAI has been recruiting top talent from Google and Apple while investing heavily in its next-gen AI models. The company expects a $200 million revenue this year, but it may not be enough to turn the large deficit around.
Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, recently predicted that future AI models will require even more computing power in the next 10 years, which could potentially make the need for expensive server costs even more essential. To mitigate this, OpenAI is looking to increase its funding by raising up to $100 billion in the next couple of years along with its team-up with Microsoft, which recently made an investment of $10 billion into OpenAI.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory established in 2015 by Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others. It’s mission is to promote and develop friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. OpenAI’s research focuses on machine learning, robotics and other artificial intelligence related topics with emphasis on safety, cooperation and long-term impact.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, originally started his career as a software engineer and then moved on to become a successful entrepreneur. In 2014 he became the president of Y Combinator where he worked on propelling the world-renowned research and investment institute. He took over the CEO role of OpenAI since 2018 with the purpose of scaling up its operations to reach a profit.