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Welcome back. Open AI's Sam Altman was in high demand at India's AI Impact Summit, meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as a host of other companies on the ground. I sat down with the ChatGPT operator in an international exclusive, where we spoke about competition, and revenue, and financing.
ChatGPT has been growing very strongly. And I feel great about the current models, the upcoming models. It's been very fun to see the momentum with Codex as a new product. Like ChatGPT is great, but you know, always expected that to do well. The strength of Codex winning the coding market has been a new and really fun thing to watch.
And and in the enterprise specifically, I mean, you go up there against Anthropic, for example. The competition Are you managing to gain customers? Co-work, there was a big deal made out of that. Yeah. And the impact it's having. I think most of the enterprise momentum right now is still on say around coding, but I I hope and expect that over this coming year, we'll start to see it for knowledge work more generally.
When you start to think about revenue as well, Sam. Ads, this is a new area. You've only just started them. What has been the initial feedback so far? So, it's super early, and I always hesitate to talk when something's this early, but the anecdotally, the feedback has been pretty positive. I think we still have some work to do to figure out the exact ad format are like, oh, this is like, you know, a cool thing.
The the ads that I have personally liked the most in recent years from tech have been sort of Instagram style ads um where you discover something new that you might really like and otherwise wouldn't have known about. I think we've got a real opportunity to push in that direction with ads in ChatGPT.
Uh another big potential new revenue driver in the future for you, Sam, is around hardware. I know you've got Jony Ive on the team. Is there anything you can tease out at this point around what you're working on? Um one of the powerful things about AI is how much context it can handle. And an AI that and we see a little bit of this with Open uh an AI that can get to know more and more about you can give you better and better products and services.
And we'd like to build a hardware that can do that very well in the virtual and the physical world. Not a small phone. Um the other part of the hardware equation as well is is semiconductors, an incredibly important part of the data center, incredibly important part of what you do in terms of training and inference, etc.
Uh semiconductors is an area I believe you are investing in and trying to figure out your own kind of product. What does that look like now? Is this going to be something you can train on as well as inference? We we will have a rich portfolio of semiconductor approaches. We will partner with uh you know, the sort of giants of the field like Nvidia.
We'll partner with newer startups in areas like fast inference like Cerebras. We'll do our own inference chip as well. Um we we expect this to have this to need more of a portfolio of solutions than maybe we initially thought, but we're very excited with our own work here. So, we're not talking just one kind of processor like a TP like Google's gone with the TPU.
We're talking potentially a multiple portfolio of semiconductors out of Open AI. Yeah, I mean, Google has a TPU. They also buy Nvidia chips and maybe some others, too. And I think you should expect the same from us. Uh just in terms of financing, though, there has been a lot of concern about the way artificial intelligence has been being financed.
Terms like circular financing have been uh thrown around. Vendor financing as well, given the fact that you buy chips from Nvidia, invested in you as well. Um there is also concern that if there is a failure at some point in this chain, it's going to have knock-on effects on companies like Open AI. So, are you concerned about that?
I don't agree with the first part of the concern. I do agree with the second part. Um new revenue's got to come into this system. Like people can invest in each other and buy each other's stuff, whatever, but if there's not new revenue coming in, that's when you get into a there's like nothing here.
But revenue's growing so fast, not just for us, but the whole ecosystem, that there there's like a massive amount of revenue coming in to support all of this infrastructure. So, I don't worry about that part. Um in terms of any one layer of the stack failing would cause some real knock-on effects, and it's sort of like a very tight supply chain right now, I do worry about that.
In terms of not being able to get access to certain technologies like chips? If yeah, something like that. Yeah. The other part of the concern, some have criticized the valuation Open AI has got and said, well, you know, there's intense competition. We've seen things like the deep seat moment can can disrupt markets as well.
Your valuation, do you think it's justified? I think so. The revenue That's up to other That's like up to a market to decide, but I think so. And the path to profitability eventually, what does that look like for Open AI? Uh we are growing at a extremely fast rate right now, I think. As long as we can have reasonable unit economics, we should focus on continuing to grow faster and faster.
Um and we'll get profitable when we think we when we think it makes sense. Microsoft is Open AI's largest investor, initially putting $1 billion into the ChatGPT operator back in 2019. And that figure ballooning to more than $13 billion, giving Microsoft a near 30% stake. But there have been concerns about the state of the relationship, which Microsoft's Brad Smith weighed in on.
But I think though, partnership between Microsoft and Open AI remains of paramount importance. It is extremely important for all of us at Microsoft. Um we continue as an investor, a supporter, a user, a licensee of Open AI technology. And we see that happening for the long term. What we have, in my view, is a partnership that remains critically important, but obviously is less exclusive on each side than it was a few years ago.
Open AI is not only betting on Microsoft infrastructure and technology, but it's working with other companies. And Microsoft is betting and using not only on Open AI models, but say models from Anthropic, open-source models, as well as the models that Microsoft is developing itself. And I think that's the world we're now in. That's the world that every customer is going to benefit from.
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