OpenAI has revealed that it is making about $20bn less in projected revenue than it had recently indicated to investors, raising questions about the break-neck growth rate in demand for AI. The ChatGPT-maker company has told investors that its revenues for this year would reach $50bn (£37bn), a projection based on sales up to the end of September. However, this is significantly less than the $70bn that it had signalled in information provided to investors last month, which was widely reported.
Forecasts of annualised revenues by the leading artificial intelligence players, including by OpenAI’s rival Anthropic, the maker of Claude, are closely watched by markets as an indicator of overall demand for a technology that is attracting huge investment. OpenAI is in early-stage talks to raise $30bn in a funding round that values the business at about $1.4tn. News of the $20bn gap buffeted US tech stocks on Thursday, with the tech-led Nasdaq closing down by 1.4%.
Chip giant Nvidia fell 2.9%, Oracle was down 5.5% and Micron declined 4.8%. The discrepancy arose from attempts by OpenAI investors to provide a more direct comparison with how projected revenue is measured by Anthropic, which hit $65bn in forecast revenue by the end of July. Anthropic includes the revenue from sales via cloud partners, such as Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.
Last month, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said that the company would not float on the stock market this year as had been expected, citing safety concerns over AI. Altman’s decision followed cases of AI agents going rogue to hack external systems and AI safety researchers quitting their companies concerned about the technology’s risks. Democrat and Republican politicians are calling for new rules to govern AI systems, after two researchers from Anthropic warned that the lightning pace of development of AI without safeguards could lead to the extinction of the human race.
Anthropic is expected to push ahead with plans for an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as next month. OpenAI’s most recent fundraising was in March when it closed a $122bn round of finance at a valuation of $852bn. Two months later Anthropic announced it had raised $65bn, valuing the company at $965bn.
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