OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar says the artificial intelligence boom is still in its earliest stages, with consumer adoption and enterprise usage surging alongside a sharp rise in revenue.
In an interview at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, Friar says the AI build-out is so vast that it could generate companies larger than any market titan to date.
Friar highlights how quickly OpenAI has scaled over the past year.
“I think a year ago, a lot of people were still like, ‘Is AI real?’ And I think here we are a year later, 700 million consumers using the product. Four million enterprises are using it, and I think the value is very real to people.”
The OpenAI executive says the growth is showing up directly in the books.
“So, revenue this year will grow over 3x. So, about $13 billion in revenue from about $4 billion last year. So, it’s tripling on a very big base as well.”
She compares the infrastructure race to historic US projects. According to Friar, AI is still in its early days and very far from its peak.
“I mean, I might have to use a sports analogy, which is always scary as someone that didn’t grow up in this country, but we’re in the first inning. A lot of people have compared the AI era to things like the railway build-out, because it is a very capital-intensive build-out.
But I think we are just beginning. We’ve maybe laid some track from New York to Baltimore, but we’re ultimately going to blanket the US, ultimately blanket the world.
Anyone who thinks this cycle is at a zenith is not seeing what I’m seeing, certainly, which is every day, every week, every month, we are very, very short of compute.”
She also predicts that AI will eventually give birth to a company with a market cap higher than $4 trillion.
“If you look at this era of computing, right, it spawned the first $4 trillion market cap companies: Nvidia, Microsoft, and so on. We think the AI era is even bigger than all of that. So should it be spawning a bigger than $4 trillion market cap company or companies?
Absolutely, yes. I certainly hope we’re one of them because we are today at the forefront. And I hope we don’t squander that lead.
I hope we can continue to build on all of the moats that we’re putting into the business. And so absolutely, I think you’re going to be in trillions of dollars of market cap in this era.”