CEO Sam Altman posted that the company is planning to “release a powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning in the coming months.” The team has been long hinting at this release: In a Reddit AMA two months ago, Altman said the company was “discussing” an open weight model and that OpenAI has “been on the wrong side of history here.” There’s also, uh, the DeepSeek of it all.
Last week, OpenAI released Images for ChatGPT which led to an explosion of interest thanks to its ability, in part, to generate Studio Ghibli inspired AI art. It looks like the virality has paid off — CEO Sam Altman posted that the company has added one million users in the last hour alone (he’s also been begging users to stop generating images: “our GPUs are melting”).
I listen to a lot of podcasts as an AI reporter since these CEOs seem to really love a hot mic and a sympathetic ear. I just listened to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson and found it especially illuminating — he hints at de-hyping AGI, how SOTA models are less important than the “1-billion daily active user destination site,” and more.
“Well, this was AI for many, many years. AI was always what we couldn’t do. As soon as we could do it, it’s machine learning. And as soon as you didn’t notice it, it was an algorithm,” Ben Thompson said.
The ChatGPT-maker expects to earn $12.7 billion in revenue this year, Bloomberg reported, which would be a massive jump from the $3.7 billion in annual revenue it raked in last year (The New York Times previously reported that OpenAI expected to earn $11.6 billion this year). It also expects to bring in $29.4 billion in revenue next year. This new revenue projection comes just months after the startup launched a $200 a month tier.
The Body Scout author Lincoln Michel has a thoughtful literary analysis of Sam Altman’s AI-written “metafictional literary short story” — which, like a lot of AI text, scans well without exactly adding up:
“I haven’t actually seen anyone praise the story as a story. No one is lauding the memorable characters or marveling at the vivid setting. Instead, the praise has focused on “good lines.” The purple prose. And the prose is the worst part.”
[countercraft.substack.com]
