Looking to put some concerns to bed, OpenAI (OPENAI) CEO Sam Altman said the ChatGPT maker is doing “well more” than $13B in revenue at present and offered up hints about the not too distant future.
“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that,” Altman said on the BG2Pod podcast over the weekend, referring to the $13B revenue figure that has been widely reported. A number of analysts and experts have wondered how OpenAI, which is partially owned by Microsoft (MSFT), could pay for all of its recent compute deals with just $13B in sales.
BG2 is hosted by technology entrepreneurs and investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley.
OpenAI is planning for revenue to grow steeply, and that it already is growing steeply, Altman added.
He also said that he would like OpenAI to be a publicly traded company for one small reason: to hurt short sellers.
“There are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it’s appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous OpenAI is about to go out of business,” Altman added. “I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that. But we carefully plan. We understand where the technology, where the capability is going to grow and how the products we can build around that and the revenue we can generate. We might screw it up. This is the bet that we’re making and we’re taking a risk along with that. A certain risk is if we don’t have the compute, we will not be able to generate the revenue or make the models at this kind of scale.”
When Gerstner asked if OpenAI could hit the $100B revenue figure in 2028 or 2029, Altman interjected and said, “How about ’27?”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.