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Amid growing chatter about an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed that the company is on track to exceed earlier estimates and generate well over $13 billion in annual revenue.
“We are taking a forward bet that it will continue to grow, and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value,” he said.
Altman made these remarks during a recent joint interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the Bg2 podcast hosted by Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of investment firm Altimeter Capital. The interview was largely focused on the partnership between the two tech companies.
The ChatGPT-maker was expected to triple its revenue in 2025 and rake in $12.7 billion, as per a Bloomberg report. The New York Times reported last year that OpenAI was eyeing a revenue of $11.6 billion for 2025. It is said to have generated $3.7 billion in annual revenue in 2024.
While the projected annual revenue is a sizeable amount for an AI startup, OpenAI also has plans to spend more than $1 trillion in computing infrastructure over the next decade. When asked by Gerstner, whose firm is an OpenAI investor, about how the company plans to pay for its massive spending commitments, Altman responded with some pushback.
“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” he said. “I just — enough. I think there are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares,” Altman added, upon being pressed by Gerstner on the subject.
Taking Altman’s side, Nadella claimed that OpenAI has “beaten” every business plan that it has given Microsoft as an investor. Altman’s testy reply comes at a time when investors and other stakeholders are growing uneasy about the AI boom turning into a bubble, even as Big Tech continues to go on a spending spree.
As per his latest assessment, artificial intelligence/machine learning research scientist Andrej Karpathy said it will take 10 more years for AI agents to work and achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), as no one has been able to develop an AI system that learns continually. “They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking, and it’s just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues,” Karpathy said in a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel.
AI returns have also remained uncertain at the enterprise level, with a 2025 MIT study finding that 95 per cent of 300 US-based firms that had invested somewhere between $35 billion and $40 billion in generative AI saw their pilot projects fail to deliver.
To be sure, Altman himself believes that the AI market bubble is real. But he has argued that it could bring still lead to long-term benefits. “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes,” he has previously been quoted as saying.
On the Bg2 podcast interview, Altman said that while OpenAI’s critics “talk with a lot of breathless concern” about its compute spending plans, they would be “thrilled to buy our shares”.
Altman said that taking OpenAI public would be one way to address such criticism. “One of the rare times it is appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous ‘OpenAI is about to go out of business’ [posts], I would love to tell them they could just short the stock, and I would love to see them get burned on that,” he said.
However, Altman also acknowledged that there are chances of OpenAI messing up a public listing, for example, by failing to get access to enough computing resources. At the same time, he denied reports that OpenAI has plans to go public next year.
“No, we don’t have anything that specific. I’m a realist; I assume it will happen someday, but I don’t know why people write these reports. We don’t have a date in mind. We don’t have a board decision to do this or anything like that. I just assume it’s where things will eventually go,” he said.
Earlier this month, OpenAI completed its transition into a public benefit corporation (PBC) and revised the terms of its deal with Microsoft, which now holds a 27 per cent stake (valued at approximately $135 billion) in the entity. Previously, the Windows-maker held a 32.5 percent stake in the for-profit arm of OpenAI. Microsoft, which has reportedly invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI so far, will remain as OpenAI’s frontier model partner for the next decade or so.
Though, its the parts of the revised deal concerning AGI that stand out the most. “Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel,” read a joint statement published by both companies on October 28.
