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Here’s a suggestion for OpenAI’s management: Stop issuing long-range revenue forecasts to investors. While we at The Information love getting our hands on these, as they makefor good stories, it’s doubtful they’re doing OpenAI much good. How can anyone take seriously forecasts for revenue reaching as far out as 2030? (OpenAI projects total revenue will reach $284 billion by then, compared with $13 billion last year.)
Analyst Jim Chanos is a well-known skeptic, but his suggestion in February that the company’s projections were maybe “just guesses” likely resonated with a few people. Take OpenAI’s forecasts we reported on today about the company’s expectations for advertising. They projected that ChatGPT will generate $2.4 billion in ad revenue this year, even though it only started testing ads in February. That seems ambitious, although not as ambitious as the $11 billion forecast for next year or the $102 billion for 2030.
OpenAI is also setting itself up for failure. Whatever ad numbers it eventually does reach will be viewed through the prism of these forecasts.
Building a giant ad business isn’t that easy: Just ask Snap, which has nearly 500 million daily active users, compared with ChatGPT’s 920 million or so weekly active users. (Daily users are more valuable to advertisers.) Snap brought in $5.2 billion in ad revenue last year, roughly a decade after launching ads. As Wall Street research firm MoffettNathanson said in a report on March 31, “While OpenAI’s advertising opportunity is quite real, the path to scale will likely be bumpier and slower than OpenAI bulls…imagine.”
And so far, OpenAI’s ad efforts haven’t impressed advertisers, as we reported last month. Many of the challenges in its ad sales operations can be overcome, but it will take time, which is why this year’s forecast looks a little too high.
OpenAI’s credibility isn’t helped by the fact that a year ago CEO Sam Altman was downplaying the likelihood that the company would sell ads at all—and now the company sees ads as a vital source of future revenue growth. At least OpenAI is adaptable.
What’s Next for xAI?
The management of Elon Musk’s three-year-old AI startup seems to be slowly disappearing. On Thursday, The Information reported that xAI’s chief financial officer, Anthony Armstrong, had departed, as part of a “wave of senior exits at the company.” These departures follow the gradual exodus of all of the company’s co-founders—except Musk, of course.
Some of it relates to Musk’s shake-up of the engineering side in an effort to improve Grok’s standing in the AI world. But it also reflects xAI’s absorption into SpaceX. Armstrong ended up reporting to SpaceX’s CFO, making his job less important.
All of this raises a question: If Musk slowly winds down xAI as he shifts his focus to taking SpaceX public and to the orbital data centers concept, will we even know?
In Other News
OpenAI said Thursday it was making several changes to how it bills companies that rely on its AI coding agent, Codex, due to rising use of the tools. The changes are geared toward matching the amount customers spend more closely with how much they use the products.
Mercor hit over $1 billion in annualized gross revenue earlier this year, up from a $500 million pace in September 2025, according to a person with direct knowledge of the company’s financials. The growth occurred before a group called Lapsus$ claimed to have hacked Mercor and offered to sell large swaths of data allegedly belonging to it.
Semiconductor startup SiFive said it raised $400 million in a funding round that values the firm at $3.6 billion after the investment.
Tesla is considering building a new SUV that would be smaller and cheaper than its current vehicle models, Reuters reported on Thursday.
Meta Platforms has agreed to spend an additional $21 billion renting AI chips from cloud provider CoreWeave from 2027 through 2032, bringing its total potential spending on CoreWeave to $35 billion.
Amazon’s chip business has reached an annual revenue run rate of more than $20 billion, CEO Andy Jassy said on Thursday in his annual shareholder letter, up from the more than $10 billion he disclosed on an analyst call in February.
Meta is pulling top engineers from across the company into its new applied AI engineering division—whether they like it or not—as part of its aggressive push to step up its competitiveness in the AI model arms race.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we break down Meta’s new model and its latest deal with CoreWeave.
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