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The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI\u2019s chief financial officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her emails and Slack messages.<\/p>\n
Friar and other company executives are banking OpenAI’s future on more of the latter as it shifts its focus to business-oriented products while shedding some of its consumer offerings as a pathway to profitability.<\/p>\n
OpenAI says it will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for \u201chigh-value professional work\u201d as the company faces heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to adopt AI assistants in their workplaces<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ll see a new model coming from us in short order. We feel very excited about it,\u201d Friar said in an interview with The Associated Press.<\/p>\n OpenAI boasts of more than 900 million weekly users of its core ChatGPT product, and Friar said about 95% of them \u201cdon’t pay anything\u201d for the popular chatbot. But while all those interactions build habits and reliance, they also strain the costly computing resources needed to power the company’s AI systems and highlight the need for big business customers to help pay the bills.<\/p>\n OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic, valued at $380 billion<\/a>, both lose more money than they make, putting the privately-owned San Francisco-based AI research laboratories in a fierce competition<\/a> to generate more revenue as they race toward becoming publicly traded on Wall Street.<\/p>\n A push to improve performance and sales of OpenAI’s business-oriented products\u2014already Anthropic’s bread and butter\u2014has driven OpenAI to abandon some consumer initiatives, like the AI\u00a0video generator app Sora<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it was a little heartbreaking, but we\u2019re like, OK, it\u2019s not the main event right now,” Friar said. “We need to make sure that our new model that\u2019s coming has enough compute.\u201d<\/p>\n Code-named Spud, OpenAI says its \u201csmartest model yet\u201d offers \u201cstronger reasoning, better understanding of intent and dependencies, better follow-through, and more reliable output in production.\u201d It will be part of OpenAI’s answer to Anthropic’s new Claude Mythos, which Anthropic claims is so \u201cstrikingly capable\u201d that it is limiting its use to select customers because of its apparent ability to surpass human cybersecurity experts in finding or exploiting computer vulnerabilities. While most people can’t use Mythos, Anthropic also on Thursday released Opus 4.7, describing it as its most powerful \u201cgenerally available” model.<\/p>\n Friar, the former CEO of neighborhood social platform Nextdoor, said business customers accounted for about 20% of OpenAI\u2019s revenue when she was hired in 2024 as chief financial officer. She said it\u2019s now 40% and expected to account for half of OpenAI\u2019s sales by the end of the year.<\/p>\n It’s a sharp turnaround from late last year, when OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was promoting a now-shuttered Sora partnership with Disney, launching a plan to\u00a0sell ads on ChatGPT<\/a>,\u00a0and floating the idea of letting\u00a0ChatGPT engage in erotica<\/a>\u00a0with paid adult users.<\/p>\n Altman said on the Mostly Human<\/em> podcast earlier this month that a sharper focus was needed\u2014and Friar agrees.<\/p>\n \u201cTech companies, when they\u2019re growing, it\u2019s just this natural thing that happens. There\u2019s so many cool things you could do,\u201d she said, adding that companies can end up doing \u201creally badly\u201d if they do too many things, while “great companies are very good at, in a reasonable period of time, kind of doing that winnowing down and refocusing, and it\u2019s super painful.\u201d<\/p>\n Signaling that shift was the hiring three months ago of Slack CEO Denise Dresser to be OpenAI’s first chief revenue officer.<\/p>\n Dresser said in a recent AP interview that she has been laser-focused on meeting with corporate leaders and positioning OpenAI as the go-to platform for workplaces employing AI agents to automate a variety of computer-based job tasks.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really clear to me that companies are past the experimentation phase, and they\u2019re into using AI to do real work,\u201d Dresser said. \u201cLeaders at companies are recognizing that AI is probably the most consequential shift of their lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n But those leaders also have a choice, namely Anthropic’s Claude, which has become widely used by software professionals. Founded in 2021 by a group of ex-OpenAI leaders who said they wanted to prioritize AI safety, Anthropic has positioned itself as the more responsible AI vendor. The distinction drew attention when President Donald Trump’s administration\u00a0punished the startup<\/a>\u00a0after a contract dispute over AI use in the military, and Altman used the opportunity to cement OpenAI’s own deal with the Pentagon.<\/p>\n Consumer interest in Anthropic surged, and the company said its annualized revenues hit $30 billion, a higher number than what OpenAI has reported, though they measure it differently. Friar and Dresser declined to reveal OpenAI’s latest sales, but both have suggested that Anthropic’s number is inflated because it doesn’t account for revenue it must share with cloud computing providers Amazon and Google.<\/p>\n