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Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that ChatGPT maker OpenAI had missed its internal targets of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of last year — and that’s on top of falling short of its revenue targets.
It was an unfortunate revelation that came at a highly inopportune time. While the AI industry continues to spend tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure build outs, a return on all those investments appears to be as distant as ever.
The pressure is clearly on for the Sam Altman-led company, with CFO Sarah Friar warning that it may not be able to pay future computing contracts if it can’t soon turn things around and start making far more money than it currently is. Then there are rumors of an IPO later this year, which could dial up the pressure even further.
But whether OpenAI will be able to build out its number one revenue source — paid ChatGPT subscriptions — fast enough remains as unclear as ever. According to recent data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower spotted by The Verge, uninstalls of the chatbot app have risen a whopping 132 percent year over year in April.
Even worse: its extremely contentious contract with the Pentagon, which Altman later called “opportunistic and sloppy,” drove uninstalls up a stunning 413 percent in March, when compared to the same period last year.
Meanwhile, its top competitor Anthropic, which recently blew past OpenAI with its one trillion dollar valuation on secondary markets, saw installs of its Claude chatbot growing faster than ChatGPT. According to Sensor Tower, downloads of Claude have increased a stunning 1,000 percent year over year — compared to just 14 percent for ChatGPT over the same period.
As installs continue to slow, the company is actively investigating raising money with ads instead, as The Information reports. OpenAI is also looking to launch a lower-priced plan, called ChatGPT Go, to make up for waning full-tier subscriptions.
At $8 a month, the company is hoping to attract 112 million users by the end of this year, while also predicting that Plus subscribers, who currently pay $20 a month, will drop roughly 80 percent to just nine million.
In total, with 122 million users, OpenAI hopes to double its subscriber base this year. It’s an extremely steep goal that, considering the increasing app uninstalls and missed user growth targets, should be taken with a hefty grain of salt.
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