30+ OpenAI Statistics for 2024 – Data on Growth, Revenue & Users

OpenAI is arguably the world’s most famous AI research and development company, whose popular chatbot ChatGPT reached 100 million users in less than two months after its launch. The company has an entire lineup of successful AI-powered products, including DALL·E and GPT-3.5, which helped OpenAI reach a $20 billion market value in 2020. 

The numbers tell a tale in the form of detailed OpenAI statistics. With the help of this OpenAI data, you can gain valuable insight into the performance of key products and services, their market value, and more.  This article covers all the key statistics and facts you need to know about OpenAI.

Latest Updates on SearchGPT in 2024

SearchGPT is one of the most anticipated updates coming from OpenAI, marking a significant advancement in search-based AI models.

Unlike traditional search engines, SearchGPT leverages advanced natural language processing and AI capabilities, similar to those found in ChatGPT, to provide more intuitive and contextually aware search results.

What is SearchGPT?

SearchGPT is expected to redefine the way users interact with search engines by delivering answers that feel more like a conversation rather than a list of links. This model is designed to not only answer questions but also understand user intent at a deeper level, offering summaries, insights, and detailed analyses of queries in real-time.

Key Features of SearchGPT

• Conversational Search Interface: SearchGPT will provide users with search results in a chat-based interface, allowing for more interactive and refined searches.
• Enhanced Contextual Understanding: It can process and understand complex queries better than traditional search engines, helping users find specific and nuanced information.
• Improved Efficiency: SearchGPT aims to reduce the time it takes to find answers by providing more direct and relevant responses to user queries.

Launch Timeline

SearchGPT is rumored to be launching later in 2024, as OpenAI continues to refine its capabilities and integrate it into various platforms.

It is expected to be incorporated into existing OpenAI products and made available to a broader audience, potentially disrupting the dominance of traditional search engines like Google and Bing.

OpenAI Timeline

OpenAI started as a non-profit organization focused on artificial intelligence research.

The company was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, together with world-class machine learning and engineering experts such as Reid Hoffman and Peter Theil. 

The company’s founders, together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research, committed $1 billion to get OpenAI going and fund its research. 

OpenAI created a new capped-profit company OpenAI LP to attract investment in 2018.

The original “free forever” model had proved an unsustainable solution for OpenAI. With vast computing power needed, large-scale cloud computing systems and AI supercomputers need funding through the new company.   

In 2018, OpenAI announced its partnership agreement with Microsoft.

The tech giant invested $1 billion in OpenAI to give it the boost to build human-like AI. As part of the agreement, all OpenAI’s services would be based on Microsoft’s cloud, and the two companies would work together to keep commercializing AI technology. 

January 2021 saw the introduction of DALL·E. 

It’s an AI system that creates realistic images based on textual prompts. The second iteration of the software, called DALL·E 2, came out a year later and now serves more than 1.5 million users, actively creating over 2 million images a day. 

The company went on to launch ChatGPT in 2022.

This trained natural language model generates textual responses to a series of prompts. Its fourth edition is the most advanced chatbot to come out of Silicon Valley. 

As part of the Microsoft deal, ChatGPT was integrated with the Bing search engine in March 2023. 

The system is part of the Edge browser and is hoped to deliver better search results and experience, potentially challenging the supremacy of Google’s Chrome web browser and search engine. 

At the start of 2023, Microsoft announced another multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI to fund future research and development of AI systems.

According to OpenAI, this $10 billion investment from Microsoft will see them raise the capital needed to fulfill their mission without sacrificing core beliefs. 

OpenAI User Stats

OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after its launch. 

Another 1.5 million users of DALL·E demonstrates the market share for the company. According to OpenAI data published by Similarweb, the total number of monthly visits to the OpenAI website hit 1.6 billion, ranking it the world’s 18th most-visited site. 

The company has yet to disclose how many users have subscribed to the $20-a-month premium service offering more stable access.  

One of the most important OpenAI statistics refers to the speed with which its ChatGPT product reached 1 million users. The table shows the same information for other well-known tech platforms.  

OpenAI Stats: Traffic

OpenAI’s traffic has increased by 53.2% month-to-month since October 2022. 

According to Semrush’s overview, 100% of that search traffic is organic and 0% is paid. More OpenAI data tells us that 86.93% of all traffic comes from direct search, followed by Google (2.23%), YouTube (0.47%), and Bing (0.19%). 

Desktop users take up 47.6% of all visits, while mobile users account for 52.4%.

These users spend an average of 13:23 minutes per session and visit 2.9 pages per visit. March 2023 traffic increased by 48.3% compared to February, but so did the bounce rate, which was 38.39%, meaning more than a third of all users leave the site without taking any action.

OpenAI User Demographics

OpenAI’s usage by gender indicates that 62.72% of the audience is male and 37.28% female. 

The largest group of users are those aged between 25 and 34, making up 34.77% of visitors. These visitors are primarily accessing the site using desktop devices. An additional 28.86% of users are those between the ages of 18 and 24, meaning that more than half of all OpenAI users (63.46%) are 34 or younger. 

Similarweb uesers have a stronger engagement with OpenAI. 

• A quarter of users are between 35 and 54 years of age, specifically 27.24%. 
• The remaining group comprises people between 55 and 65+ years old, making up 5.74% of OpenAI users. 
• 15% of all OpenAI users come from the United States. 
• India comes in second, with 6.24% of all OpenAI users. 

OpenAI Users by Country

OpenAI is currently available in 156 countries worldwide. 

Some of the more notable exclusions are Russia, China, Venezuela, Belarus, and Ukraine. The core audience for OpenAI comes from five countries: the United States, India, Japan, Colombia, and Canada. 

The top five countries where OpenAI has the most users account for 30.93% of all traffic. 

Other countries send the remaining 69.07% of traffic. However, Italy banned the use of ChatGPT in April 2023, citing privacy concerns after some users’ messages and private information were exposed following a server error at OpenAI.

In April 2023, there was a 46.43% increase in traffic from the USA. 

The most significant increase in user activity is seen in Columbia with a 92.73% uptick while France, Germany, and the UK were no longer on the list of the top-five countries with the most OpenAI users. 

OpenAI Business Statistics

OpenAI has partnered with some of the biggest businesses on the market, including Salesforce, Bain & Company, and others. 

The company’s API platform is already being widely used in businesses of all sizes and industries, making it possible to implement its massive AI models into everyday operations.

Snap, Quizlet, Instacart, Shopify, and Speak have already implemented OpenAI’s ChatGPT and speech-to-text API Whisper into their products.  

Close to 1,000 companies from all sectors are using OpenAI. According to HG Insights, there are only seven states where companies have yet to partner with OpenAI. OpenAI products power 190 companies in the state of California alone. 

Shutterstock and OpenAI joined forces to allow developers of DALL-E to use data from Shutterstock in the AI’s training. 

More than 250 tech companies rely on OpenAI in some capacity and companies that have over 10,000 employees are OpenAI’s biggest collaborators. Corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue comprise the largest group of businesses using OpenAI products. 

Open AI Investment Data

OpenAI founders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others, donated over $1 billion to fund the then-non-profit organization. 

The company altered its structure and became a “capped-profit” organization to attract investments and ensure further growth of its AI solutions.

OpenAI has raised $11 billion in funding over six rounds.

There’s a total of nine investors backing the company, and according to OpenAI stats, Microsoft and Matthew Brown Companies are leading the pack. 

Microsoft’s initial investment into OpenAI was $1 billion. 

In 2023, Microsoft announced it would invest another $10 billion into OpenAI. As a part of the investment deal reported by Semafor, Microsoft gets 75% of OpenAI profits until it recovers its investment. 

In a secondary share sale, OpenAI was valued at $20 billion with an estimated market value of an estimated $29 billion, including the Microsoft investment. 

After Microsoft reclaims the investment, it should end up with a 49% stake, with other investors, including Khosla Ventures, taking 49%, thus leaving OpenAI with 2% in equity. 

OpenAI offered to sell existing shares in a tender offer that would put that $29 billion price tag on the company, as per Wall Street Journal. The returns for the first round of investors are capped at 100x the investment.

OpenAI Revenue Statistics

OpenAI expects to cash in $200 million in revenue in 2023 and up to $1 billion by 2024. 

Between 2016 and 2019, OpenAI was obligated to file IRS Form 990, an annual information return like all other organizations claiming federal tax-exempt status. According to the data, OpenAI’s best year was 2018, when the company raked in $49,968,631 in revenue. 

The following table offers a complete overview of the revenue the company has generated over the years: 

OpenAI’s profits took a major hit in 2020 during the transition from a non-profit to a for-profit.

However, following the launches of GPT-3 and DALL-E, the revenue bounced back, totaling a projected $200 million in 2023. 

OpenAI statistics and projections by PitchBook data indicate that the company is poised to make $1 billion in revenue in 2024, a 400% increase. 

As for profits, OpenAI recorded its best outing in 2019, netting close to $29 million. Things turned sour in 2020 when the company recorded slightly more than $9.5 million in profits. 

Here’s a graphic representation of OpenAI’s profits since its inception. 

OpenAI Predicted Growth 

OpenAI is en track to becoming one of the most valued and profitable tech companies in the AI market. 

The demand for artificial intelligence has led to OpenAI being valued at $29 billion by its owners, following the multi-billion dollar investments from Microsoft and other key investors. 

Namely, in OpenAI’s recent pitch to investors, as per a report by Reuters, the management claimed the company could earn as much as $1 billion in revenue by 2024. 

The company is on track to generate $200 million in revenue, which is 150% more than it earned in 2022. Analysis by Scott Raney, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, has said that OpenAI’s strategy of being a strong and independent standalone company is far from a viable solution. He emphasized that reaching almost $30 billion in valuation is just a step towards going public and that OpenAI’s IPO is coming.   

OpenAI Product Data

OpenAI’s product portfolio includes ChatGPT, OpenAI Five, DALL-E, Whisper, and GPT.  

The most popular product is ChatGPT, but other products have had their share of success and contributed significantly to OpenAI statistics.

DALL-E

• DALL-E is an AI system that can take textual input and descriptions and turn them into original photorealistic images. as well as re-edit and retouch photos.
• In January 2022, OpenAI released DALL-E 2, an even more powerful and advanced solution capable of generating higher-resolution images and new options.
• The system was created by training neural networks and their descriptions through deep learning mechanisms. 

OpenAI Five

• OpenAI Five is a program composed of five neural networks trained to beat human teams at Dota 2.
• The program was initially designed and released in 2017.
• The system has played 180 years worth of games against itself daily and learns through self-play.
• Its training takes place thanks to a version of Proximal Policy Optimization powered on 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores. 

ChatGPT

• ChatGPT is an AI-powered language model and tool trained to execute natural language tasks using engineered text prompts.
• The model was trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). 

GPT 4

• GPT 4 is OpenAI’s most advanced AI system capable of performing tasks that require greater logical ability, advanced reasoning, and understanding of complex instruction.
• It is the fourth iteration of the product, and as such, it’s more reliable and creative and shows a better understanding of nuances in instructions than ChatGPT or GPT-3.5.  
• Whisper
• Whisper is a trained open-source neural network by OpenAI that’s considered the world’s greatest automatic speech recognition (ASR) system.
• It was trained on over 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask OpenAI data collected from various web sources.
• Every audio input is cut into 30-second parts that then get converted into a log-Mel spectrogram and finally passed into an encoder, a decoder then predicts the corresponding text caption.
• The price of using Whisper API will be $0.006 for every minute of input. 

OpenAI Regulatory Facts

OpenAI has recently updated its usage policies to make them clearer and more aligned with safety regulations.

In the policy, it is stated that the company doesn’t allow the use of its tools and products for illegal purposes, creating hateful and harmful content, generation of malware, any kind of fraudulent activity, adult content, and many other high-risk activities. 

It also states that automated systems must disclose to users that they are interacting with an AI system. 

There are further requirements for consumer-facing industries to indicate that AI is being used to inform them and to state its limitations. 

The rise of ChatGPT is already prompting the change in the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, the block’s artificial intelligence regulation, proposed in 2021. 

According to lead lawmakers on AI, the systems that generate complex texts without human oversight should be labelled as “high-risk”, which would force developers to abide by stricter rules of transparency, human supervision, and safety. 

Italy was the first country to ban ChatGPT in March 2023

Italy’s watchdog in charge of data protection, Garante, announced a temporary ban on ChatGPT for Italian users, citing a data breach on March 20, 2023. It is said that some users could see titles from other users’ chat histories, and 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus users might have had their data revealed to another user.  

OpenAI until April 30th to meet local and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy regulations to continue to operate in the country.

However, OpenAI has given assurances that it will set out measures to address the issue, but the official remedies aren’t fully clear as of May 2023. Users can now turn off their chat history, and any conversations that take place while the chat history is turned off will not be used to train OpenAi’s models. 

German authorities have also launched an inquiry into the company’s privacy policies and GDPR compliance. 

OpenAI vs. Competitors

The generative AI market is expected to reach a combined value of $98.1 billion by 2026, according to PitchBook. 

• Google’s experimental conversational AI service, Google Bard, has been pitted as ChatGPT’s biggest competitor. It’s powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA for short. 
• Anthropic, an AI company founded by former OpenAI leaders Dario and Daniela Amodei, has released a new chatbot called Claude to rival ChatGPT. 
• Cohere focuses on developing large language models that carry out human-like conversations, auto-complete sentences, and more. 

Let’s see how OpenAI stacks up against its biggest challengers: 

OpenAI Future Plans

OpenAI is focused on creating artificial general intelligence — AI systems smarter than humans in order to benefit humanity. 

In a recently published company manifesto by Sam Altman, it was stated that OpenAI wants to leverage AGI and use it to bring access to help with cognitive tasks, prolonging lifespan, drive the global economy, and ultimately challenge the limits of imagination and possibility. 

According to OpenAI’s short-term plans, the company wants to help people evaluate complex tasks, such as coding errors, and all outputs of complex AI models.

Their long-term plans involve using AI to come up with new ideas and better align human values with AGI. Unaligned AGI systems pose a great risk to humanity, so their approach to training AI systems is based on human feedback and engineering an AI system that aligns with human intent. 

The company launched the OpenAI Startup Fund in 2023, a $100 million venture fund to help new AI products from aspiring startups.

The fund’s first four portfolio companies include an AI-powered video and podcast editing software company, Descript, AI language tutor Speak, and an AI lawyer Harvey. It can be more effective for OpenAI, as evidenced by OpenAI statistics, to acquire or invest in companies that might have a product that could endanger its position as the leader in the field than invest in creating other products. 

OpenAI Awards

OpenAI has yet to win awards in the field of artificial intelligence, but it seems its products might have won something. Artist Boris Eldagsen entered his AI-generated piece “The Electrician” in the World Photography Organization’s Sony World Photography contest and won. 

Eldagsen refused to take the prize, stating that he wanted to show how the art world was ill-prepared for DALL-E, Midjourney, and other AI image-generation technologies. 

Fun Facts About OpenAI

There are scores of exciting OpenAI stats that clearly demonstrate the impact the company has had on the AI industry. 

• It took ChatGPT just five days to get to 1 million users. 
• GPT-4 beats 90% of humans who take the bar to become lawyers. 
• ChatGPT is banned in New York City public schools as of January 2023. 
• OpenAI can turn movie titles into emojis. 

References

• OpenAI
• WSJ
• Whisper
• GPT-4
• Medium
• Bloomberg
• Crunchbase
• Fortune.com
• CNBC
• The Guardian
• Yahoo
• Politico
• PetaPixel