The OpenAI business model

On the morning of November 18, during a tech conference in Tokyo, Ting Cai received a news alert about OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who had been ousted in a boardroom coup.

Cai, chief data officer of Japanese tech giant Rakuten, was caught off guard. He had flown back from San Francisco days earlier, where he had recently seen the chief executive of the artificial intelligence pioneer and his team, with whom Rakuten had been collaborating on a new AI business platform.

Straight away, the Japanese executive was reassured by OpenAI’s senior management that there had been no wrongdoing on Altman’s part, and Rakuten decided to keep faith in its partnership with OpenAI. Three days later, Altman was reinstated, under a new board. “It was difficult times for them, but our bond and relationship is even stronger,” Cai says.

Rakuten was not alone in standing firm behind OpenAI’s business, despite ructions at the top of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-up. In December, OpenAI’s revenues surpassed $2bn on an annualised basis, making it one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history.

Since the launch of its viral chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI has built up a business that is among a handful of Silicon Valley companies, including Google and Meta, to have posted revenues of $1bn within a decade of being founded.

OpenAI at work: Rakuten

Rakuten formed a strategic partnership with OpenAI in 2023. OpenAI has helped the company to build its own AI tool to support clients with marketing, sales, customer support, operations, strategy planning and engineering

The Microsoft-backed company believes it can more than double its yearly run rate — a measure of the most recent month’s revenue, multiplied by 12 — in 2025. The company’s enterprise tools, built on generative AI models that are capable of producing text, code and images, have been bought by finance, media and technology giants ranging from Morgan Stanley to Axel Springer,…