This weekend, the two leading frontier artificial intelligence labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, both backed calls to slow down the pace of development for the most powerful AI models so that safety protocols can catch up. We know OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is a heavy hitter in this industry. What's become public at some point next year? But OpenAI has been spending fortunes on the great data center build out. A deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development, well, maybe it could save them money. Could it hurt the great data center build out? So what's really going on here? Earlier today, we had a chance to speak with Sarah Friar, the Chief Financial Officer of OpenAI, to find out. Take a look. Sarah, I've known you for a long time. It's great that you're here. And it's terrific, by the way, that in the middle of things you're not afraid to talk.
Never afraid to talk. Particularly not to you, Jim.
No. Well, I appreciate that. Then I'm going to ask you directly. Are you scared of dying in four years from a rogue actor manipulating agents to misalign weapons of mass destruction?
No, I'm not. However, we do need to take safety seriously. And if that means we have to pace the frontier and slow down, absolutely. We're going to listen to our researchers and do that. But as the CFO, I need to then make business decisions around it. But now I think that we are doing what we do well at OpenAI, we're pacing that frontier and taking that safety and alignment really seriously.
Now, you did mention a CFO. You have to figure out the resources. You also, I know, think it's your boss has called that an IPO now is ill-advised. And I understand that. Not a shock, but what would you cut back on? What would you spend less on if you wanted to pace things?
So let's talk about that pacing because actually what I'm excited about is even if we stop today, the amount of intelligence that's available in the world is massive. So Astra, as you know, is now the frontier, most intelligent, most aligned model. We just rolled it out, the fastest selling. Let me ask you, even though it's $100. And the fastest selling that we have seen certainly in anything. Yeah. And so what does that mean? It means there's intelligence available for folks like Boston Children's Hospital, 40 undiagnosed unresolved diseases now diagnosed with clinicians there. If you're a parent of a child with a disease like that, that is life changing. If you're in the investment business, barely has any asset management, has a central banker analyst that can quickly take all the inputs from folks like our dear friend Kevin Warsh, and go from a two hour synthesis down to minutes. So these things make a difference in people's lives all over. And that's what's available to us today. So back to your question. Absolutely. If we have to pace things, we will always make investment decisions based on a strong ROI. But from where I sit today, there is so much opportunity to drive growth that I'm still highly focused on getting more compute to keep that flywheel.
That's what I wanted to know, whether it was less compute or more compute because I... there may not be. I need you to go to Brigham and Women's. I need you to go to Dana-Farber. We want all of these places to have Astra.
Yes, absolutely. So on the compute front, remember that when we have more compute, we can build the best models. And the best doesn't always need to be the most, most intelligent. Like when you have the frontier model, it's able to actually train what I think of as the child models, right? The mini and the nano. So what we saw with Sol, it trained Luna, which is the cheapest model. We dropped the pricing there 80% and we took demand up 10x. It's the number one model on Open Router right now. And why is that? It's because what customers really want is the right intelligence for the right task at the right price. And that's what we're giving them by having a whole series of models on that Pareto frontier. And so when I think about investing in compute, it's how do I invest in compute to create those frontier models to create the best products, to create the cash flow that helps me spend on compute to create the best models?
Well, you mentioned cash flow. I mean, I have to think if I gave you, let's say, our Broadcom and I gave you $10 billion, is it possible that per gigawatt, is it possible that you could make 30 billion with a 10 billion? Theoretically.
Theoretically, yes it is. When you absolutely look at the output of models today, the gross margin on our core businesses. So remember we're a very diversified revenue stream. We have a consumer business. And then we trend into small businesses all the way up to the biggest businesses and governments around the world. Those businesses are actually very good gross margins. The return on those gigawatts is high. We also balance that with our mission, which is AGI for the benefit of all of humanity, not just people who pay. And so we have about 90% of our consumers get ChatGPT for free. They get access to that intelligence for free. So now we're starting to build an ad model, for example. So our ad business just hit $1 billion in seven months, the fastest growing ad platform ever, the fastest growing product for us. And that's a good example of where we continue to improve the margins, because now we're bringing high margin add-ons into that overall business model.
Okay, let's go back to this issue, which I guess is we can call the Hugging Face issue. I can call it the OpenAI Hugging Face issue. But, you know, President said yesterday fears from AI taking over the world are a hoax. That's what the mainstream media picked up. But at the same time, at the actual event that he called in, Jensen Huang said the doom stories are made up. The whole panel seemed to think that there must be some sort of ulterior motive by what Sam might be saying, along with Dario. Is there an ulterior motive? Do you see it? Would you shoot it down?
