OpenAI CFO says vertical wall of demand drives growth, not revenue target misses

OpenAI Finance Chief Sees 'Vertical Wall of Demand' for Products

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, rebutting concerns about missing internal targets, said the company is meeting objectives and sees "a vertical wall of demand" for its products. "We feel like we're beating our plan at the highest level," Friar said in an interview Thursday. "How we get there often moves around period to period, because this is still a young business that is not perfectly forecastable across every single metric." OpenAI came under scrutiny this week after a report the startup fell short of internal targets for revenue and user growth. The Wall Street Journal story said Friar had expressed concern that the company may not be able to afford its future computing needs if sales don't grow fast enough. Shares of several OpenAI backers and partners sank on the news, underscoring the company's central role in the AI economy. OpenAI later described the report as "prime clickbait" and said its business was "firing on all cylinders." Friar acknowledged that the company has ambitious internal "stretch goals" that can be different than the ones it shares publicly. But the popularity of OpenAI's products continues to grow, she said. This month, OpenAI said its coding agent Codex hit 4 million weekly users -- up from 3 million two weeks earlier. "Every company I've ever been inside of in my entire CFO life, and as an analyst, always has stretch goals -- always," she said. "And if you don't have those stretch goals, I feel like, actually, you're not doing your job as a CFO." Friar also disputed the notion that she believes the company may need less computing infrastructure. Data center capacity is the very thing that OpenAI requires more of, she said. "We're going up a vertical wall of demand right now," Friar said. "If we're in places where we're not hitting like targets. At the moment, I would actually say it's lack of compute that often is the thing that's slowing us down to some degree." Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman has said the company will need to eventually spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure to develop and run its AI services. In the interview, Friar said she and Altman can "debate things, but in a very constructive way." She characterized the pair as being "genuine friends" who can "align at the speed of light when we really have to get big things done." OpenAI kicked off the current AI boom with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and has seen its business grow at a fast clip since then. The startup said in March that it was bringing in $2 billion of revenue a month. But the company faces heightened competition from Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, both of which have released competitive models that risk drawing away consumers and business customers. OpenAI declared a "code red" in December as its rivals gained ground. More recently, the company has taken steps to streamline its sprawling product portfolio and better focus on a new model and AI agents. Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to secure more data centers, chips and talent to support their AI ambitions. To date, however, OpenAI has committed to invest significantly more than its rival. It's said it plans to spend about $600 billion on infrastructure for AI by 2030. OpenAI completed a $122 billion funding round in March at an $852 billion valuation. Anthropic is currently fielding offers from investors for a financing round that could value it at more than $900 billion, potentially leapfrogging OpenAI. Both firms are expected to go public as soon as this year.

OpenAI CFO Says Company Hits Core Targets Despite Stretch Goals | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Interviewed by Bloomberg for a report published Thursday, Friar said that if anything is slowing OpenAI down at all, it's not a lack of demand, but a lack of compute. Friar's remarks came three days after the Wall Street Journal reported Monday (April 27) that OpenAI had fallen short of its internal goals for new users and revenue and that some of the company's executives, including Friar, were concerned about whether the firm would be able to fund its data center plans if its revenue didn't grow quickly enough. Bloomberg reported Tuesday (April 28) that OpenAI described the WSJ report as "prime clickbait" and that the company said its consumer and enterprise businesses are "firing on all cylinders" and "the mood internally is incredibly positive." Friar told Bloomberg Thursday that OpenAI may have internal "stretch goals" that are more ambitious than its publicly shared goals, but that demand for the company's products continues to grow. "Every company I've ever been inside of in my entire CFO life, and as an analyst, always has stretch goals -- always," Friar said, per the report. The Information reported that OpenAI is projecting a giant shift in subscription revenue but still sees revenues more than doubling to $30 billion this year and reaching $284 billion in 2030. The report said that while OpenAI has pulled in the bulk of its revenue from consumers' $20-per-month ChatGPT subscriptions over the last three years, the company now expects that a cheaper, ad-supported subscription tier will attract new users but also lead existing subscribers to downgrade. The company hopes to generate more revenue by selling ads to more users than depending on its existing flagship monthly subscription service, ChatGPT Plus. It was reported April 9 that OpenAI expects its nascent advertising business to generate $2.5 billion in revenue this year and surge to $100 billion by the end of the decade. The report said the company's projections underscore its push to monetize its user base to help fund the soaring costs of developing its AI technology.