how much is early adopter exploration?

I meant there are other companies who are building their entire companies (not just features) on OpenAI’s products and those companies have revenue. Been going on for a couple years. I was at one such startup.

They are kind of like a Stripe or Twilio in that sense (in their current form)

Which companies are making money on it? I'm talking billion dollars.

None.

How would we know? they’d still be private. A billion in revenue is like a public company 3-5 years after IPO. The aggregate probably is making quite a bit, though.

Maybe in a few years if no competitors emerge.

No one grows a "billion dollars" business that quickly.

A super-fast growing company like Slack took 5 years to reach $200M in annual revenue.

Jasper.AI is growing quicker than that. $45M in annual revenue last year, targeting $75M next year.

I suppose that depends what their monetization strategy is.

I haven't paid a ton of attention, but my impression was that it's "sell our tech via an API." This relies on other companies building things that make a lot of money on top of that API. I know some are, but I'm not aware of any particularly successful ones yet.

Maybe someone will find a killer application for this that solve an expensive problem for someone. In that case, yeah, OpenAI will make bank. Or maybe the best you'll see is a bunch of small fries selling fun toys and OpenAI will never really take off in terms of actual revenue. Or maybe, by the time someone finds killer applications for OpenAI's tech, the tech will already be available from other providers (like GPT-Neo or StableDiffusion).