On Monday, OpenAI crowed that it recently hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That’s an incredible $9 billion increase over the $5.5 billion calculated last year. This enormous growth underscores just how fast the company is exploding and the demand for its AI technologies is sweeping the world. That success comes on the heels of a frazzled day for its crown jewel, ChatGPT. Regrettably, this meant that the majority of users experienced a short period of downtime during that time.
On Tuesday, users began reporting issues with ChatGPT, leading to nearly 2,000 outage reports recorded on Downdetector. The OpenAI status page confirmed that the platform faced “elevated error rates” for approximately seven hours, creating interruptions in service for many relying on the AI’s capabilities.
The combination of reported outages notwithstanding, OpenAI’s accelerating ARR growth is a testament to their emerging market dominance. The company’s journey has not been without challenges. It reported a loss of about $5 billion last year as it invested heavily in research and development to enhance its offerings. The recent seven-day outage shines a spotlight on whether its services are sustainable in the face of $40 million annual losses.
OpenAI continues to promise a fix for issues that are harming present-day ChatGPT. In a public incident report on their status page, the company wrote,
“We are still working on implementing the mitigation for this issue.” – OpenAI status page
The company assured users that they would continue to provide updates as progress is made.
“We will continue to provide updates as progress is made.” – OpenAI status page
OpenAI is apparently very proud of the technology improvements in ChatGPT, specifically noting work around improving system messages. According to their release notes, these changes improve “intonation and naturalness, creating more fluid and human-like interactions.” This commitment to improving user experience underscores OpenAI’s determination to maintain its competitive edge in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.