OpenAI raked in over $1.6 billion in revenue this year amid CEO Sam Altman drama

OpenAI raked in $1.6 billion in annualized income in 2023 according to The Information, which cited people with knowledge of the figure.

The figure, up from $1.3 billion in October, comes amid the dramatic ouster and then return of the company’s CEO, Sam Altman. The company credits much of its revenue to its massively popular ChatGPT, a large language model.

OpenAI’s board fired Altman under murky circumstances this fall, only to be faced with uproar from the company’s staff. Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, was soon reinstated to his position.

Questions remain about why he was ousted in the first place, however, with the board making vague allegations that he had not been candid about OpenAI’s work in his communication with the board. 

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Altman opened up about his firing and speedy rehiring in a podcast appearance with late-night host Trevor Noah.

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Altman revealed that when he received the call that he had been let go from OpenAI on Nov. 17, he was in a hotel room in Las Vegas, where he was in town for the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

“It felt like a dream,” Altman told Noah. “I was confused. It was chaotic. It did not feel real. It was obviously…painful. But confusion was just the dominant emotion at that point. It was like I was just in a fog, in a haze.”

Within the next half hour after getting the call, he said, he received so many messages that the nonstop notifications made his smartphone unusable, and it froze up and stopped working for a while. He said “everyone” was calling, including Microsoft.

Altman said he then flew back to California to meet with some people and was very focused on moving forward at that point. He said he couldn’t sleep that first night, and it was sort of “a crazy weekend from there.”

Noah noted that Altman said nothing disparaging against OpenAI after being fired, and said it appears the dismissal took a toll on him.

“I don’t think it’s anything I won’t bounce back from, but I think it’d be impossible to go through this and not have it take a toll on you,” Altman replied. “That’d be really…really strange.”

Fox Business’ Breck Dumas and Reuters contributed to this report