OpenAI wants to be more than an AI company

Could it be any clearer that Sam Altman intends for OpenAI to be a sprawling consumer tech company, not just an AI lab? His public comments certainly suggest as much. Today, The Verge reported that OpenAI has been working on an internal prototype of a social network that would let people share their AI-generated images.

OpenAI began as a fairly rudderless little AI lab back in 2015. “We literally had no idea we were ever going to become a company—like, the plan was to put out research papers,” Altman said in a recent Stratechery interview. “But there was no product, there was no plan for a product, there was no revenue, there was no business model, there were no plans for those things.”

ChatGPT changed everything. The AI chatbot took off like a rocket when it was quietly released to the public in late November 2022, soaring to 100 million users within weeks—faster than any consumer app in history. At the time, OpenAI was making some money by selling API access to its early models. But ChatGPT turned OpenAI into a consumer tech company. You simply don’t second-guess numbers like that.

And the growth hasn’t stopped. “Something like 10% of the world uses our systems now a lot,” Altman said on April 11 at a TED event—a figure that implies OpenAI has around 800 million users. That’s why the company has been so busy adding new features and services to ChatGPT, now a household name. It’s added internet search, image generation, and deep research capabilities, with more surely on the way.

In his Stratechery interview, Altman even floated the idea of OpenAI offering something other tech giants—Apple, Google, Meta—already provide: a single sign-on for the web.

“[W]e have this idea that you sign in with your OpenAI account to anybody else that wants to integrate the API, and you can take your bundle of credits and your customized model and everything else anywhere you want to go,” Altman told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. “And I think that’s a key part of us really being a great platform.”

This vision ties neatly into Altman’s social network ambitions. Facebook parlayed its dominance into a single sign-on system that allowed it to follow users around the web, collecting data on the sites they visited and what they did there. OpenAI could similarly leverage a social network and single sign-on to gather valuable data to train future AI models. (OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment.)

There are other signs of Altman’s ambition to broaden OpenAI’s scope—including hardware.

The company is reportedly considering acquiring Io Products, a hardware startup cofounded by Altman and former Apple designer Jony Ive. The startup is developing a personal AI device designed to know all about the user and help with daily tasks. (Altman and OpenAI are also reportedly exploring designing their own AI chip, following in the footsteps of Amazon, Apple, and Google.)

But much of OpenAI’s time and energy in the coming years will likely be spent growing its breakout product, ChatGPT, into a full-fledged AI-first tech platform.

“I really believe in this product suite,” Altman told Thompson. “I think that if we execute really well, five years from now, we have a handful of multibillion user products.”

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