OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap sees 2024 as the "year of adoption for AI in the enterprise" and shares some insights.
According to Lightcap, OpenAI currently has around 600,000 individual users for its ChatGPT Enterprise product. The company is also working with thousands of companies worldwide to adapt its AI technology to their specific use cases and IT infrastructure, he says.
At the beginning of the year, Lightcap said about 260 companies are using ChatGPT Enterprise, with thousands more on the waiting list.
"2024 will be the year of adoption for AI in the enterprise," Lightcap says, adding that while companies were still getting an overview of AI's capabilities in 2023, demand will now increasingly be driven by concrete applications that deliver measurable business results.
Lightcap is optimistic that generative AI is an enabling technology that will make companies more efficient and people more productive. The technology could have a huge impact on how people learn and understand information.
The partnership with Microsoft puts OpenAI in a position to meet this growing demand. Enterprise customers can access OpenAI's AI models via Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service. At the same time, OpenAI also serves enterprise customers independently of Microsoft.
When asked if OpenAI's AI business is bigger than Microsoft's, Lightcap replied that the lines are blurred, and they focus on what's best for the companies they work with.
Despite the focus on business customers, OpenAI has a very diversified business model and serves "hundreds of millions of users" with ChatGPT, many of whom are paying customers, Lightcap emphasized. He did not provide specific numbers.
Microsoft's quasi-acquisition of Inflection.ai with Deepmind founder Mustafa Suleyman, who now plays a leading role in Microsoft's consumer AI products, doesn't worry Lightcap that OpenAI might lose its top position as Microsoft's preferred AI partner. OpenAI also works with many partners, he says.
The quest for compute
The COO sees one of the biggest challenges in providing enough computing power to meet the rapidly growing demand for AI. OpenAI is giving a lot of thought to how it can make sure the supply chain keeps up so it can build the systems needed to meet demand over the next ten years.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly planning to raise huge sums of money to build a global chip infrastructure and develop an alternative to Nvidia.
The AI company currently employs around 1,200 people, most of them in San Francisco, some in London and Dublin, and is increasingly expanding to other parts of the world.