It looks to me like paid subscriptions were not available in January? But regardless: if they have 100M MAUs then 833k paid would be ~1% of their user base which doesn’t seem crazy to me?
I would love better numbers here though, if you have them.
Paid subscriptions started with the official release of GPT-4 (March). 100M is likely a significant underestimate now, I don’t think the user-base saturated there. This say 1B users (but doesn’t seem that credible). Also 1% seems kind of low when the GPT-4 answers are significantly better (I guess you can also get GPT-4 for free on Bing though). I’d be surprised if there were <10M paid subscribers (c.f. Netflix and Spotify with ~200M each).
Cool, I think you know this but: revenue multiples are by definition based on historical data; since the round closed before March it by definition could not have included ChatGPT Pro subscriptions.
I’m sure Open AI tried to convince its investors that it was on the verge of making a bunch of money, and maybe investors believed them, who knows. I think it could be useful to redo this analysis under that assumption, if someone wants to. It does seem weird that they are supposedly only forecasting $200 million in revenue this year if they are plausibly getting more than that from just ChatGPT.
Re revenue, $200M is only 833k paid subscribers using chatGPT with GPT-4 (it’s $20/month). This seems like a massive underestimate.
It looks to me like paid subscriptions were not available in January? But regardless: if they have 100M MAUs then 833k paid would be ~1% of their user base which doesn’t seem crazy to me?
I would love better numbers here though, if you have them.
Paid subscriptions started with the official release of GPT-4 (March). 100M is likely a significant underestimate now, I don’t think the user-base saturated there. This say 1B users (but doesn’t seem that credible). Also 1% seems kind of low when the GPT-4 answers are significantly better (I guess you can also get GPT-4 for free on Bing though). I’d be surprised if there were <10M paid subscribers (c.f. Netflix and Spotify with ~200M each).
Cool, I think you know this but: revenue multiples are by definition based on historical data; since the round closed before March it by definition could not have included ChatGPT Pro subscriptions.
I’m sure Open AI tried to convince its investors that it was on the verge of making a bunch of money, and maybe investors believed them, who knows. I think it could be useful to redo this analysis under that assumption, if someone wants to. It does seem weird that they are supposedly only forecasting $200 million in revenue this year if they are plausibly getting more than that from just ChatGPT.