The Dominance of OpenAI: 100+ Stats on Downloads, Revenue, and OpenAI's Market Share

In 2024, it has become increasingly more strenuous to come across a technology based company or conversation that is not somehow related to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although not always recognized, it must be acknowledged that the main driver behind the current state of AI is a company called OpenAI. OpenAI, along with its current head, Sam Altman, has fiercely drawn mass attention and widespread discourse within the past year. The private research facility based in San Francisco has been developing many different unique and novel applications that leverage AI and generative technologies that allow users to generate images, text, and audio by inputting natural language into a model. The most popular of such applications is called ChatGPT. 

ChatGPT has become such a disruptive force in a wide variety of fields that it has caused governments, schools/universities, and workplaces to evaluate the possible repercussions potentially brought on by the use of artificial intelligence. Our internal research (Source) has even uncovered that since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been a 72% increase in published papers being potentially written by AI. As OpenAI continues to disrupt the fields of machine learning and neural networks, we can see below the many underlying trends and statistics that have shaped the current research behemoth before us.  

Who Founded OpenAI? 

OpenAI, the research organization was co-founded by Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman and is backed by $1 billion in funding from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) (Source). Below we can explore the more acute details behind OpenAI’s founding:   

• OpenAI came to life in 2015 in San Francisco as a joint initiative of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. (Source)
• Elon Musk co-founded the AI company in 2015 but left in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla. (Source)
• On Nov. 17 2023, the startup’s board ousted CEO Sam Altman  (Source)
• Following the announcement, hundreds of employees signed a letter threatening to quit and work with Altman at Microsoft leading OpenAI to rehire Altman less than a week later.  (Source)
• In March 2023, Musk signed an open letter that called for a six-month pause on AI development (Source)

Where is OpenAI Located? 

OpenAI first opened its doors in the historic pioneer building located in the mission district of San Francisco California (Source) in 2016. Since then the company has grown exponentially and thus moved out to several new spaces, highlighted by the following: 

• The company, which was formerly housed in the historic Pioneer Building in San Francisco's Mission District, has since moved down the street into a four story, 59,000 square foot office space created by combining buildings at 575 Florida Street and 1960 Bryant Street. (Source)
• OpenAI is leasing the two spaces and in late 2022 filed documents with the city to reclassify 1960 Bryant Street from a "light manufacturing" space to an "arts activity" space. 575 Florida Street is classified for planning purposes as a laboratory. (Source)
• OpenAI is growing its presence in Europe with its newest office in Dublin, Ireland. (Source)
• The first international office in London signifies a milestone in OpenAI’s growth, showcasing their commitment to broaden the scope of their operations, bring in diverse perspectives, and accelerate their mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. (Source)

What are OpenAI’s Major Product Offerings? 

Amongst ChatGPT, OpenAI offers a robust suite of machine-learning applications that allow users to  interact with machine learning neural networks. The following list includes some of the most promising and innovative product offerings released by OpenAI: 

• ChatGPT: a model which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. (Source)
• GPT-4: the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning (Source)
• DALL-E: can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles (Source)
• Clip: efficiently learns visual concepts from natural language supervision (Source)
• Whisper: can transcribe speech into text and translate many languages into English (Source)
• OpenAI Five: plays 180 years worth of games against itself every day, learning via self-play (Source)
• OpenAI Codex: a GPT language model fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub, and studying its Python code-writing capabilities. (Source)
• OpenAI Gym: a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms (Source)

Product Features

Carrying on with exploring the many products offered by OpenAI, here is a brief look at some of the highlights when it comes to the technical capabilities of OpenAI’s application suite: 

• With another feature called Actions, OpenAI is letting GPTs hook into external services for accessing data like emails, databases, and more, starting with Canva and Zapier (Source)
• More than 1.5M users are now actively creating over 2M images a day with DALL·E (Source)
• Over 100K users sharing their DALL-E creations and feedback in OpenAI discord community (Source)
• OpenAI introduced Outpainting, a new feature which helps users extend their creativity by continuing an image beyond its original borders (Source)
• In 2016, OpenAI released its first tools, an open-source toolkit for reinforcement learning (RI) OpenAI Gym and Universe which was essentially a test-bed for training AI agents (Source)
• In 2018, the company released a paper “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”—introducing the concept of a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) (Source)
• OpenAI has world-class optical character recognition (OCR) technology to digitize files like PDFs, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe spoken words (Source)

OpenAI Major Release Schedule

Since its inception in 2015, OpenAI has steadily rolled out novel innovative AI models that offer unique ways to interact with reinforcement learning algorithms. Their most successful and commonly used model is ChatGPT. Below is a timeline of the major milestones in ChatGPT’s and OpenAI’s history: 

• OpenAI founded on Dec 11, 2015 (Source)
• GPT-1 is created and launched on June 11, 2018 (Source)
• GPT-2 advances on the previous model and is released on February 14, 2019 (Source)
• GPT-3 becomes latest model, releasing on the anniversary of GPT-1 on June 11, 2020 (Source)
• InstructGPT, the sibling model and inspiration for ChatGPT launches on January 27, 2022 (Source)
• On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art conversational deep learning system (Source)
• Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is the latest iteration of a series of large language models that have garnered significant attention since the introduction of the first GPT model in 2018. (Source)
• ChatGPT Plus, the paid subscription model of ChatGPT is introduced on February 09, 2023 (Source)
• ChatGPT API is made public to businesses and corporate clients on March 01, 2023 (Source)
• GPT-4, the latest GPT model is released on March 14, 2023 (Source) 
• ChatGPT IOS Mobile app makes its way on the Apple app store on May 18, 2023 (Source)
• ChatGPT Android Mobile app is made available to android mobile users on July 21, 2023 (Source)
• ChatGPT Enterprise launches direct corporate product offering on August 28, 2023 (Source)‍
• OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced GPT-4 Turbo in November 2023 (Source)

OpenAI Corporate Structure 

Is OpenAI a Non-Profit Corporation or For-Profit? 

OpenAI’s current corporate structure is one with many nuances, so to clear any confusion here are the main points surrounding the OpenAI corporate model:  

• OpenAI is registered in San Francisco, California and designated as 501(c)3 nonprofit, making the company tax-exempt since 2016 (Source)
• OpenAI founded OpenAI LP, a for-profit company that will exist alongside its not-for-profit counterpart. (Source)
• OpenAI’s earliest investors and employees are limited to making 100x their initial investment (Source)
• OpenAI’s hybrid corporate structure, with both a for-profit business wing and a non-profit research lab wing, determines how investors in the company will eventually be paid out (Source)

Who Profits at OpenAI? 

After looking at OpenAI’s Corporate structure, it’s clear that some profits will eventually leave the OpenAI ecosystem and be repurposed outside the original core mission. As such, here are the finer details of OpenAI’s plans for profit distribution: 

• After those early investors are paid out their principal, 25% of OpenAI’s profits will go to employees and to pay early investors (until they hit their profit cap), while 75% will go to Microsoft until it recoups its $13B principal (Source)
• After Microsoft recoups its $13B, it will get 49% of all OpenAI profits until it gets to $92B (at which point they’ll hit the profit cap), while 49% will go to early investors and employees and 2% will go to OpenAI’s non-profit arm (Source)
• Once $92B in profit is generated and paid to Microsoft—along with that $13B in principal—all equity reverts back to OpenAI, along with 100% of future profits. (Source)
• Microsoft will reportedly get a 75% share of OpenAI’s profits until it makes back the money on its investment, after which the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI. (Source)
• Under the terms of a deal it made with Microsoft earlier this year, the tech giant is entitled to 75% of OpenAI’s profits until its $13 billion investments in the startup are repaid (Source)

OpenAI Financial Figures

Now that we have better insight into who stands to profit from OpenAI’s success we can look at the financial record of the firm. Below are statistics (recent reports??) regarding OpenAI’s recent financial performance:

**Disclaimer: The financial figures and valuations presented in this report are based on available information and industry estimates. As the company under consideration is private, these figures should be regarded as speculative and subject to inherent uncertainties. Readers are advised to exercise caution and consider the speculative nature of the data provided, recognizing that actual financial conditions may differ from the presented estimates.**

• For all of 2022, the company’s revenue was $28 million. (Source)
• OpenAI's annualized revenue from ChatGPT in October 2023 was $1.3 billion (Source)
• OpenAI, is on track to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue in 2023, according to a new report (Source)
• Analysts estimate OpenAI will add between $30 billion and $40 billion to Microsoft’s top line (Source)
• Three sources briefed on OpenAI's recent pitch to investors said the organization expects $200 million in revenue next year and $1 billion by 2024. (Source)
• In 2022, before it began charging users to access its generative A.I. chatbot, ChatGPT, OpenAI’s annual revenue reached just $28 million, according to The Information (Source)
• OpenAI on track to recover some of its losses, which doubled to around $540 million in 2022 (Source)
• OpenAI spends approximately $700,000 daily to operate ChatGPT (Source)
• As of December 30, 2023, OpenAI's annualized revenue topped $1.6 billion on strong growth from its ChatGPT product, up from $1.3 billion as of mid-October (Source)

**Disclaimer: The financial figures presented in the graphs below are based on the publicly available tax filings of OpenAI's non-profit division, as mandated by US law for non-profit organizations. However, it is important to note that OpenAI has recently established a private for-profit division, which is not obligated to disclose its financial information publicly.**

The following charts represent the tax filings filed by the non-profit division of OpenAI since 2016 (Source):

Was OpenAI’s Recent Mobile App Rollout Successful? 

Looking deeper, we can ascertain how much of this revenue is being driven by the sales of mobile ChatGPT subscriptions since the mobile application was made publicly available on both the IOS and Android app stores in Q2 2023: 

• Set another record in September 2023 for nearly $4.6M USD revenue on Android and IOS app stores (Source)
• ChatGPT on mobile brought in gross revenues of $2.1 million in June, increasing to $2.74 million in July, then $3.81 million in August, and now, the latest record, $4.58 million in September (Source)
• The U.S. is the largest market for the AI chatbot app, accounting for 60% of ChatGPT’s revenues (Source)

OpenAI Funding Rounds

Although OpenAI has been largely successful in capturing market attention and increasing the size of their development team, it is inconceivable that the company would have reached the same heights without major funding along the way. The following are major events in the OpenAI capital funding journey:

**Disclaimer: Funding round valuations presented in this report are approximations derived from various sources. Readers should be aware of the speculative nature of these figures and exercise due diligence, recognizing that actual financial conditions may differ. **

• Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk , Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI (Dec 2015). In total, these funders have committed $1 billion (Source)
• OpenAI was most recently valued at $20 billion (Dec 2022) in a secondary share sale. (Source)
• As of January 2023, Microsoft is set to invest $10 billion in OpenAI as part of a funding round that would value the company at $29 billion (Source)
• In April 2023, OpenAI picked up about $300 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (Source)
• This year, the company—which was privately valued at around $27 billion after a $300 million share sale in April—has doubled down on its efforts to build revenue (Source)
• In October 2023, Thrive Capital led the purchase of OpenAI employee shares at an $80B+ valuation. (Source)
• This deal would expand Thrive’s investment in the artificial intelligence developer, which sold employee shares to Thrive and other investors around April at a valuation of $27 billion (Source)
• As of December 2023, OpenAI is in early discussions to raise a fresh round of funding at a valuation at or above $100 billion, a deal that would potentially cement the ChatGPT maker as one of the world’s most valuable startups. (Source)

How Big is the AI Market for OpenAI? 

As OpenAI currently plays one of the biggest roles in the AI space, looking at the trends within the AI market could shed light on OpenAI’s market potential in the future: 

• Consultancy PwC estimated AI-related economic impact could reach $15.7 trillion globally by 2030, nearly the gross domestic output of China. (Source)
• Generative AI ended 2022 as a nearly $11 billion market (Source)
• The generative AI market is growing at a 31% average annual rate — much faster than Microsoft’s 18% growth in 2022 (Source)
• The global AI market is expected to grow at a 31% compound average annual rate to $152 billion in 2032 (Source)

Does OpenAI Actively Pursue Partnerships? 

Along with OpenAI’s market potential, we can similarly take a look at the current stature OpenAI maintains through its extensive array of partnerships and business relationships. The following are some of the most prominent partnerships recently announced by OpenAI:  

• OpenAI CEO says 2 million developers are now working with the company’s tools (Source)
• Around 460 companies on the Fortune 500 are using its products. (Source)
• Morgan Stanley wealth management deploys GPT-4 to organize its vast knowledge base. (Source)
• Stripe leverages GPT-4 to streamline user experience and combat fraud. (Source)
• Khan Academy explores the potential for GPT-4 in a limited pilot program. (Source)
• Recently partnered with the Icelandic Government and Miðeind ehf to improve GPT-4’s ability to speak Icelandic by integrating their curated datasets. (Source)
• OpenAI has acquired the team at Global Illumination, a company founded by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon, and Joey Flynn. The entire team has joined OpenAI to work on their core products including ChatGPT. OpenAI acquired Global Illumination on Aug 16, 2023. They acquired Global Illumination for $100M. (Source)
• According to OpenAI’s GitHub page, the company uses a variety of programming languages for its projects and research including Python, C++, JavaScript, Ruby, and Jupyter Notebook (Source)
• Also partnered with non-profit organization Free Law Project, which aims to democratize access to legal understanding by including their large collection of legal documents in AI training (Source)

What’s Next for OpenAI?

After reviewing OpenAI’s market potential and existing partnerships, we can look at OpenAI’s future plans to determine where the company intends to be within the next few years: 

• OpenAI launched a GPT store in late Q4 2023. The store will let users share and sell their custom GPT bots. The company plans for this marketplace to drive innovation and revenue for the coming years. (Source)
• The AI startup, along with former Google Chair Eric Schmidt, also announced $10 million in grants for research on making AI safe for humanity (Source)
• After OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4, finished training, they spent more than 6 months working across the organization to make it safer and more aligned before releasing it publicly (Source)
• OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content compared to GPT-3.5 (Source)

OpenAI Traffic and Demographics 

The current buzz surrounding OpenAI and its many product offerings is self-evident in their constant appearance in headlines but to serve as further proof here are some of the most recent traffic statistics behind OpenAI (Source):  

• 67th most visited website in USA
• 4th most visited website in Computers, electronics, and technology category
• 1.6 billion site visits in December 2023
• 35.96% site bounce rate (Dec 2023)
• 4.26 pages per visit (Dec 2023)
• 00:05:04 average site visit duration (Dec 2023)
• 8.28% decrease in site traffic compared to previous month (Nov 2023)

OpenAI shows great marketing potential as currently, the site reaches roughly 1.6 billion users (Source) through direct searches, the chart below shows how many users OpenAI reaches through other web traffic sources:

Similarly, this next graph illustrates the traffic driven to OpenAI by different social media channels (Source):

Youtube- 60.09%

Twitter/ X- 10.61% 

Facebook- 7.45% 

Linkedin- 5.75%

Whatsapp Messenger- 4.97% 

Other- 11.12%

OpenAI User Demographics

 As of December 2023 (latest available data), the most common OpenAI user can be described by the stats below; 

Gender: 

Male- 56.01%

Female- 43.99% 

(Source)

Age: 

18 - 24 =  27.98%

25 - 34 = 33.45%

35 - 44 = 18.46%

45 - 54 = 11.14%

55 - 64 = 5.57%

65+ = 3.4%

(Source)

Geography: 

United States- 14.24%

India- 7.58%

Philippines- 3.33%

Japan- 3.32% 

Canada- 2.64% 

Rest of World- 68.88%

(Source)

OpenAI Frequently Asked Questions

Does OpenAI Sell Data?

OpenAI has remained steadfast in that personal information surrounding users is not to be disseminated or sold to contractors, however, other information submitted by users that is not deemed to be “personal or sensitive” may be transferred to third parties. Please review below the following excerpts from OpenAI’s privacy policy (last updated on November 14, 2023):

•  “We don’t “sell” Personal Information or “share” Personal Information for cross-contextual behavioral advertising (as those terms are defined under applicable local law). We also don’t process sensitive Personal Information for the purposes of inferring characteristics about a consumer.”  (Source)
•  “We share content with a select group of trusted service providers that help us provide our services. We share the minimum amount of content we need in order to accomplish this purpose and our service providers are subject to strict confidentiality and security obligations.” (Source)

Who can use OpenAI and is it free?

•  By default, anyone can access GPT-3.5-turbo—the less powerful GPT model—for free. To use the more advanced GPT-4, you'll need to upgrade to OpenAI's paid subscription, ChatGPT Plus. (Source)
•  ChatGPT is not meant for children under 13, and we require that children ages 13 to 18 obtain parental consent before using ChatGPT. While we have taken measures to limit generations of undesirable content, ChatGPT may produce output that is not appropriate for all audiences, or all ages and educators should be mindful of that while using it with students or in classroom contexts. (Source)

Is OpenAI Safe to Use?

OpenAI dedicates itself to maintaining high levels of security for its entire application suite. As a core part of their mission, OpenAI institutes practices of external auditing and compliance to ensure that users are protected in using their products. The following points highlight OpenAI’s dedication and strategy regarding security:

• OpenAI complies with GDPR and CCPA. We can execute a Data Processing Agreement if your organization or use case requires it. (Source)
•  The OpenAI API has been evaluated by a third-party security auditor and is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. (Source)
•  The OpenAI API undergoes annual third-party penetration testing, which identifies security weaknesses before they can be exploited by malicious actors. (Source)
• OpenAI invites security researchers, ethical hackers, and technology enthusiasts to report security issues via our Bug Bounty Program. The program offers safe harbor for good faith security testing and cash rewards for vulnerabilities based on their severity and impact. (Source)

Who are OpenAI’s Competitors?

Although OpenAI has been heralded as the figurative king of the hill within the generative AI space, that doesn’t mean that other competitors are not vying for the crown. Look below to see some of the most prominent OpenAI competitors:

• Anthropic: Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, Anthropic in January released a limited test of a new chatbot to rival ChatGPT. Its name is Claude(Source). Follow the highlighted links to read Originality.ai’s more in-depth coverage of Anthropic and the Claude model.

• Cohere: Aidan Gomez, co-founder of Cohere Inc., describes his company as similar to OpenAI in that it’s also developing large-language models that can carry out conversations. But the audience for Cohere is not consumers. “What we’re really focused on is bringing this technology to enterprises, developers and startup founders” (Source)

• Google: The company was a pioneer in the field of large-language models with BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), a system used to fuel the company’s market-dominating search engine. (Source)

• Baidu: The Chinese search giant has rolled out an artificial intelligence chatbot service similar to ChatGPT. The tool, whose name hasn’t been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results. Baidu has spent billions of dollars researching AI. Its Ernie system — a large-scale language model that’s been trained on data over several years (Source). To learn more about Baidu’s involvement in AI, follow this link to read Originality.ai’s coverage on Baidu.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of OpenAI?

At the crux of OpenAI’s business model is the use of AI LLM (Large Language Model). Using this innovative technology comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. Below are some pros and cons to the utilization of these models (Source):

Advantages: Saved time, enhanced efficiency and accuracy, more-personalized online experiences

Disadvantages: Lack of contextual awareness, Potentially damaging bias, Harm caused by misinformation, Lack of transparency

Conclusion

OpenAI continues to remain at the center of media attention while being a point of heated contention among AI detractors and enthusiasts. Since the research lab’s founding and the public release of its first AI product, OpenAI Gym, OpenAI has maintained its focus on developing the state of AI and steering it in ways that “benefit all of humanity”. Although that vision may have been somewhat contorted through varying funding rounds and a partial move towards a for-profit corporate structure with the creation of OpenAI LP, we are yet to see whether or not applications like ChatGPT will have meaningful and sustainable positive impacts on all levels of society. Either way, we will surely have much more to analyze and discuss if OpenAI is successful in rolling out its future products like GPT-Next and GPT-5.