EP6: Company Spotlight - OpenAI

November 30th, 2022, a research lab with fewer than 800 employees put a chatbot on the internet. One million people signed up in five days. A hundred million within two months. No consumer product in history ramped that fast. This episode is the full picture of OpenAI, how it got into the lead, what it's actually building behind ChatGPT, and the very real cracks underneath one of the most valuable companies the private markets have ever produced. In this episode: [00:00] Cold open: the ChatGPT launch that put AI on every board agenda in the world [01:30] The origin story: how a nonprofit AI safety lab became an $800B capped-profit company and why Elon Musk left and sued [04:00] The November 2023 board crisis: OpenAI fires its CEO, un-fires him in four days, and reshapes the entire board by end of week [06:00] The full product footprint: ChatGPT, the API processing 15 billion tokens per minute, Codex, Operator, and the Sora discontinuation [09:00] Stargate: the $500B infrastructure bet that is building more compute power than some major cities [11:00] What's in the brochure vs. what you need to know: OpenAI is not profitable and does not expect to be for several more years [13:00] The lead is narrowing: ChatGPT's share of AI web traffic dropped from 86% to 64% in roughly a year while Google Gemini climbed 21 points [15:00] The Sora lesson: what it actually means when a vendor pulls a flagship product overnight and breaks the workflows of hundreds of companies built on top of it [17:00] Takeaway: the question is not "is the product good?" It's "do I understand the business I'm betting on?"   If this changes how you think about the AI vendor decisions your organization is making right now, send it to one leader who is about to standardize on a platform without asking the harder questions. New episodes every week on Prompting Revenue. Connect with Brett: Work with Brett: https://brettjansen.ai/workwithbrett Join the AI Build Community: https://brettjansen.ai/community LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brettjansen