Amid all the attention trained at the artificial intelligence (AI) conversations in Davos, there is a mild sense of panic among the global AI adopters in particular, who have discovered a post by OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar. In the post, Frier seems to suggest that OpenAI is open to the idea of taking a share of customers’ AI-aided discoveries. This comes as the company has repeatedly emphasised the need to open up more revenue streams, including the recent confirmation of in-conversation advertisements within ChatGPT.
“As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path,” writes Friar. For OpenAI, current revenue streams include consumer and enterprise focused subscriptions, usage-based APIs which are linked with production workloads, and something as recent as ChatGPT Checkouts which will corner a 4% share of Shopify merchant sales marking an e-commerce push for the AI chatbot.
There is a strategic shift which is worth noting. OpenAI hopes to quietly begin reframing its relationship with enterprise customers from simply being a “tool provider” to one of a long-term infrastructure partner and that they hope would eventually include AI agents deployed in a workplace.
Friar’s comment isn’t a stray remark. In fact, she further explains, “Securing world-class compute requires commitments made years in advance, and growth does not move in a perfectly smooth line. At times, capacity leads usage. At other times, usage leads capacity. We manage that by keeping the balance sheet light, partnering rather than owning, and structuring contracts with flexibility across providers and hardware types.”
It is important to put Friar’s quote in context, before the company itself possibly clarifies its stance. It is very unlikely that OpenAI will start demanding a share of profits from consumers who have used ChatGPT or OpenAI’s models to discover a business model or product — they wouldn’t have the scale or volume. Nevertheless, any legal framework that will define any such agreement, should safeguard interests of both parties in any such licensing deal. It is possible OpenAI will reach out to enterprise customers, owing to the aforementioned scale and volume, and offer them a deal including a revenue share with OpenAI for products made using OpenAI’s tools. At this point, what options the enterprise customers would have to agree or disagree to pursue with this agreement, remain unclear.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct transfer of profits or revenue. A close reading of Friar’s quote, points us to “licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing”, which quite clearly means the focus will be on businesses and enterprises making things with ChatGPT. It is not clear how OpenAI would unlock that information of a ChatGPT-based success story, before approaching the business or enterprise with suggestions of sharing revenue. This could, in fact, mean differential pricing for subscription or API pricing.
Financially, OpenAI needs to unlock more revenue, and fast, considering there are staggering spending commitments in place. These include the $500 billion Project Stargate data centre initiative, a $300 billion deal with Oracle for powering OpenAI’s AI infrastructure, and buying Nvidia’s AI hardware to build 10 gigawatts of data centre capacity. Financial forecasts peg OpenAI’s operational and research costs will mean they’ll burn through around $115 billion by the year 2029.
It will not be an easy pursuit however. The plan to insert advertisements in ChatGPT conversations of free tier users as well as ChatGPT Go subscribers, has received negative commentary. In fact, Google DeepMind CEO Sir Demis Hassabis recently noted in a public appearance that he was “a little bit surprised” that OpenAI moved to introduce ads in ChatGPT. Hassabis then went on to assure Google Gemini subscribing enterprises and consumers that the company currently has no plans to include ads in any Gemini subscription tier.
The ads plan is already drawing regulatory attention in the US, with OpenAI and other AI firms being questioned about “sponsored” content inside chatbots, which also raise concerns around consumer protection, privacy, and child safety.
The current scenario isn’t very confidence inspiring either. An internal document that was widely reported recently, indicates the AI company will clock $14 billion in losses through 2026, with these losses rising to close to $44 billion until 2029. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is believed to be in discussions with investors from the Middle East, for an estimated $50 billion funding round, though OpenAI has not made any official announcements on the same.
Nevertheless, as there often are two sides to every corporate saga, consumer worries about OpenAI eyeing their discoveries and potential revenue streams are likely to initiate reconsideration about continued usage of OpenAI’s products. This will be particularly true for enterprises, who would like to avoid any legal complications later.
As Saad Naja, the founder of AI Lab PiP World, noted on X, “Basically we’re paying for the subscription, and then giving them a finder’s fee for our own work”. It is unlikely enterprises and businesses would appreciate this approach. The question is, if OpenAI believes it is worthy of a share of success of its GPT models in enterprise settings, will it also step in to aid OpenAI-subscribed businesses that go south financially?
