OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said "we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies in 2025 and that the company's ChatGPT Pro plan, which runs $200 a month, is unprofitable.
Yes, Altman was feeling a bit reflective entering 2025 and provided a few thoughts on OpenAI's evolution in a blog post and on X. Here are some of the key points from Altman.
ChatGPT Pro doesn't make money, but the subscription launched a month ago. On X, Altman noted that ChatGPT Pro doesn't make money at $200 a month because more people are using it than expected. While this disclosure made headlines, it's not really a shocker that a new SKU that launched Dec. 5 isn't profitable. OpenAI is in a weird spot where more usage actually raises prices as ChatGPT processes queries. The company will need more individuals to fork over $200 a month (good luck), upsells to business plans and more efficient compute to make the economics work.
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Agentic AI will unfold in 2025--maybe. "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes," said Altman, who is going with that digital labor theme that other tech executives like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff are using.
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AGI is coming, but there's more. Altman said OpenAI is confident it knows how to build AGI, but superintelligence is the goal. He said:
"We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again."
OpenAI will need more capital. Not a shocker, but Altman noted the company "had no idea we would need such a crazy amount of capital" when it started. "There are new things we have to go build now that we didn’t understand a few years ago, and there will be new things in the future we can barely imagine now," he said.
Altman feels attacked. Altman said:
"We’ve also seen some colleagues split off and become competitors. Teams tend to turn over as they scale, and OpenAI scales really fast. I think some of this is unavoidable—startups usually see a lot of turnover at each new major level of scale, and at OpenAI numbers go up by orders of magnitude every few months. The last two years have been like a decade at a normal company. When any company grows and evolves so fast, interests naturally diverge. And when any company in an important industry is in the lead, lots of people attack it for all sorts of reasons, especially when they are trying to compete with it."
What was missing from Altman? Talk on compute. How is OpenAI aiming to become more efficient? Should OpenAI use other clouds to train models? Will AI ever be carbon neutral? And the big question: How much money is OpenAI losing per query to ChatGPT?
