OpenAI's Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has hit $10 billion, calculated by multiplying its current monthly revenue by 12, according to a company spokesperson. The total comes from ChatGPT subscriptions and API sales, but does not include Microsoft licensing or custom contracts. Internal forecasts seen by The Information suggest OpenAI could earn $13 billion a year by 2025. The company is aiming for $174 billion by 2030. Under its deal with Microsoft, OpenAI gives up 20% of its revenue. In 2024, annual recurring revenue was $5.5 billion.
In a romanticized essay on the supposedly imminent singularity, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentions an interesting fact about ChatGPT's energy consumption: a single ChatGPT request consumes an average of 0.34 watt-hours of power and 0.000085 gallons of water. That energy usage is roughly on par with what a Google search consumed back in 2009, but Altman excludes the fact that ChatGPT is likely handling far more requests per person. And with new AI models like multimodal systems, agents, and advanced reasoning engines demanding even more compute, the rapid expansion of data centers suggests the overall energy appetite of these systems is only increasing.
OpenAI is delaying its first open-weight language model since GPT-2 until later this summer,CEO Sam Altman said on X. Originally planned for release before the end of June, the model will include reasoning capabilities. Altman said the research team made unexpected progress that now requires more time, calling the result "very worth the wait." The model was first announced in April.
Disney and Universal have filed a joint lawsuit against AI image generator Midjourney for allegedly creating unauthorized images of characters like Darth Vader and the Minions. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in California, accuses Midjourney of repeatedly copying copyrighted material despite previous requests from the studios to stop. Both companies are seeking damages, a jury trial, and an order to prevent future use of protected characters. Reported cases of such copyright issues date back to 2023. Midjourney has not responded publicly.
"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism."
ChatGPT kept its lead in May with 5.49 billion visits, according to new data from Similarweb. Google Gemini saw the biggest growth, up 28.9% to 527.7 million visits. Claude rose 4.2% to 99.7 million, while Perplexity grew 12.1% to 178.6 million. Deepseek dropped 9.15% to 436.2 million, and Grok fell 8.92% to 178.6 million. Gemini surpassed ChatGPT in mobile app downloads for the first time in April and May.
Google's Veo 3 video generator now includes a faster option, Veo 3 Fast, which more than doubles the speed of the previous model at 720p resolution, according to Google's Josh Woodward. The update is already available in both the Gemini app and Flow. For Gemini Pro users, the daily limit has increased to three new video generations—up from the earlier single ten-credit pack—while Flow Pro users are charged 20 credits per video. Gemini and Flow Ultra subscribers continue to receive higher quality and more generations on their existing plans. Google is testing additional features like picture-to-video with voice input. The company also plans to expand Veo 3 Fast to more countries and make it available for Workspace accounts.
OpenAI has lowered the price of its o3 language model by 80 percent, CEO Sam Altman said. The new cost is $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens. The move follows Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro pricing, which ranges from $1.25 to $2.50 for input and $10 to $15 for output, depending on token length. Until now, Gemini had been much cheaper than o3 at similar performance. Altman also introduced a higher-tier o3-pro model and said users would be "happy" with the pricing given its performance. OpenAI said that the stronger o3-pro model is launching today.
