OpenAI: we see 'a vertical wall of demand for our products'

These are turbulent days for OpenAI: they were ignited by a report in the Wall Street Journal that the company is failing to meet some internal revenue and user growth targets, including the goal of one billion weekly active users by the end of 2025. In the aftermath, the group branded it as 'pure clickbait', and then rounded out its response with the words of its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, who spoke exclusively to Bloomberg. The manager dismissed the concerns, saying that the company is meeting its targets and sees 'a vertical wall of demand' for its products.

"Overall we are doing better than expected," Friar said. "The path to get there often changes from period to period, because we are still a young company and not everything is perfectly predictable in every detail."

Wall Street is watching very carefully what happens to the most important company in the generative artificial intelligence paradigm. The IPO, which could be the biggest in history, is expected in the coming months. And the sceptical report on the pace of growth was enough to make the Nasdaq go negative, demonstrating the weight OpenAI already has on the economic and financial prospects of Ai.

According to Wsj, Friar expressed concern that the company may not be able to sustain future computing needs if sales do not grow fast enough. To Bloomberg, the CFO acknowledged that the company has ambitious internal 'challenging goals', which may be different from those communicated publicly. Nevertheless, the popularity of OpenAI products continues to grow. This month, OpenAI reported that its coding agent Codex had reached 4 million weekly users, which compares with 3 million two weeks earlier.

"Right now we are facing a vertical wall of demand," Friar said. "If there are areas where we are not achieving certain goals, I would say it is often the lack of computational capacity that is slowing us down to some extent. In the interview, Friar said that she and Altman can "argue even heatedly, but in a very constructive way". She described their relationship as that of 'true friends' who are able to 'align at the speed of light when it comes to getting important things done'.