OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain
- Reference: 0177110333
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/23/1853236/openai-forecasts-revenue-topping-125-billion-in-2029-as-agents-new-products-gain
- Source link:
> For two years, ChatGPT has been OpenAI's cash cow. But by the end of the decade, the company has told some potential and current investors it expects combined sales from agents and other new products to exceed its popular chatbot, lifting total sales to [1]$125 billion in 2029 and $174 billion the next year , according to documents seen by The Information.
>
> The projections, which would propel the 10-year-old startup's sales toward the level of Nvidia or Meta Platforms today, reflect rapid revenue gains from agents, or AI software that can take actions on behalf of customers, as well as other new products. These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-forecasts-revenue-topping-125-billion-2029-agents-new-products-gain
dwarfed by blockchain (Score:2)
The real money is in blockchain! The BC market is expected to reach $1,431 billion by 2030! [1]https://www.grandviewresearch.... [grandviewresearch.com]
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-blockchain-technology-market
I wouldn't invest in these numbers (Score:2)
The revenue now is 12billion. Yeah they aren't monetizing free users. There are lots of competitors and most people don't need premium services. The accuracy isn't good enough for me to pay money. I might pay 10-20$ month, but there will always be the free services, so I'll just switch to those.
Re:I wouldn't invest in these numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
> The revenue now is 12billion. Yeah they aren't monetizing free users. There are lots of competitors and most people don't need premium services. The accuracy isn't good enough for me to pay money. I might pay 10-20$ month, but there will always be the free services, so I'll just switch to those.
Monetizing free users could be figuring out how to shove ads into the AI. Imagine if every answer includes a "sponsored by" byline. Or, more horrifying, they just slip in corporate sponsored answers whether they're appropriate or not, like Google does on their search engine.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, pretty much. The need for proper training data will ensure that smaller players have to have FREE models for the public to play with. There will be no other option
And for most people these options will be good enough. Like most open source solutions
Re: (Score:3)
> The revenue now is 12billion. Yeah they aren't monetizing free users. There are lots of competitors and most people don't need premium services. The accuracy isn't good enough for me to pay money. I might pay 10-20$ month, but there will always be the free services, so I'll just switch to those.
There are two key questions to future growth projections for any company: (1) future growth of the total addressable market (TAM) and (2) competitive projections and moats.
There is a wide range of views about TAM growth. Regardless, the real issue is the competitive landscape. What is it that will give OpenAI a competitive moat? The indicated growth rate doesn't happen with an overwhelming competitive moat. Why is Nvidia so impressive? Because after 5-10 years of many competitors trying to compete, in
Re: (Score:2)
> ...future growth of the total addressable market....
Is that a 32-bit market, or a 64-bit one? That will determine the growth potential.
nonpaying users (Score:2)
Where was the link to the site this report came from?
Anyways;
'These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.'
I'm curious to know how OpenAI plans to make this money. Will they force ads somehow on those users? Sell data about their interactions with the AI? Or worse, will they steer those users in directions that are beneficial to someone who will pay for it?
Re: (Score:1)
Last I heard, OpenAI is still losing money on even their Pro plan users, with a burn rate of $5 billion+/year. If they forecast $125 billion in revenue by 2029, I would expect their actual profit/loss for the year to be on the order of negative $300 billion.
Re: nonpaying users (Score:2)
This is the correct analysis. They still lose money on everything they do, and need all the world's money and resources to continue.
Re: (Score:2)
When it requires burning this much money to compete, there won't be a lot of competition. So all the competitors can just be their customers.
Re: (Score:2)
> Where was the link to the site this report came from?
> Anyways; 'These include those tied to "free user monetization," likely meaning money made from OpenAI's nonpaying users.'
> I'm curious to know how OpenAI plans to make this money. Will they force ads somehow on those users?
Yes.
> Sell data about their interactions with the AI?
HELL yes.
> Or worse, will they steer those users in directions that are beneficial to someone who will pay for it?
Yes, though on the surface that won't appear to be that different from option number 1.
Perhaps (Score:3)
The thing is, after having attended many exuberant presentations about future forecasts which turned out to be based on little more than wishful thinking disguised as pretty diagrams, pictures, buzzwords, and whatnot, I would be surprised if this one is the exception.
Re: (Score:2)
> The thing is, after having attended many exuberant presentations about future forecasts which turned out to be based on little more than wishful thinking disguised as pretty diagrams, pictures, buzzwords, and whatnot, I would be surprised if this one is the exception.
Did you get this one? "Climb on board and use AI all day every day or you will get left behind!" Of course, they fail to mention that the main reason they need you aboard is so that they can gather training data from your usage. Or just data in general.
And the lies get bigger (Score:2)
AFAIK, they do not even turn a profit at this time. All they have to keep them afloat is more and more stupid money.
Did ChatGPT calculate that number? (Score:2)
It says a lot of things.
Yes... (Score:2)
A chart that quickly goes to a vertical line. Totally plausible!
They want to be a monopoly (Score:2)
This goes along with their proposal for buying Chrome, they want to suck out all the data from the public web and paywall it behind their "AI", which is really just a glorified search engine with extra filters.
I'd pay for it (Score:2)
The last thing I was doing before coming to Slashdot was generating an image of my pet dog with Winnie the Pooh for a bedtime story tonight. It's not a high value use of AI, but I would definitely pay a subscription to keep my access, especially if they'll keep generating things that are obviously plagiarizing a copyrighted work (Disney's version of Winnie the Pooh).
Investorbabble (Score:3)
I remember seeing a slide deck for Uber claiming the total addressable market for their services was the entire delivery industry plus all human travel modes besides walking.
This is chum for investors.
We shouldn't be surprised (Score:2)
LLMs are nothing but bullshit generators, so we shouldn't expect the companies that make them to be much else.
( [1]https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com] )
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
Kinda Silly... potentially past the singularity (Score:1)
You really can't project anything past the singularity and since some people are projecting ASI by 2027 we just do not know if there will even be an "economy" in the traditional sense of the word.
Embodied dumb AGI is already destroying many jobs. We have a likely recession in the near future. Amazon could shed 90% of its employees by 2029. And they are not likely to find new jobs.
Enough suckers still buying their scam (Score:2)
with promises that an all mighty AI overload will be in reach within the next few years.
The bigger they are ... (Score:3)
... the harder they fall. What a colossal waste of money.
This is replacing billions of dollars (Score:2)
Worth of employees. So no it's not a waste. Now if you contact the business you get a chat bot and it's a chat bot can't answer your question you get a slightly better more CPU intensive chatbot and that can go on three or four levels at least before you either maybe get a person or they just cut you off because you're too expensive to bother with as a customer.
Automation is what this is it's just automating White collar jobs. We spent the last 50 years automating Blue collar jobs and it took out 70% of