Is it already time for AI to become a commodity?
The Information (paywall):
Paid subscribers to OpenAI’s ChatGPT nearly tripled to 15.5 million last year from 5.8 million a year earlier, The Information reported. Based on pricing for ChatGPT, that growth implies that the popular chatbot was likely generating at least $333 million in revenue per month by the end of last year, or at least $4 billion on an annual basis.
That is a great news, especially because they predicted $2 bn a year for 2025, while already at $3.2 bn a year. But:
Despite last year’s success, OpenAI faces new threats this year, especially from Chinese AI developers like DeepSeek, who offer open-source models comparable to OpenAI’s at much cheaper prices. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to acknowledge the DeepSeek challenge this week and said on Reddit that the company is considering releasing some model weights—or the settings that determine how a model responds to questions—publicly.
The Chinese have nothing to lose, they are making money off volumes. DeepSeek has done a lot for the AI world, but for the rest of us it has come very close to AI being a commodity.
OpenAI has indeed released o3-mini, which competes with DeepSeek-R1 for reasoning, and made it available, under fair usage limitation, to everybody. Pretty similar to R1.
I like where this AI wars are going, everybody wins.
