You said today is the worst product from you today. The model that you use today is the worst AI model that you'll ever use for the rest of your life. Yeah.
Kevin, so you know on this slide in five years as the ninth most valuable company in the world. Okay, so $300 billion in enterprise value today is measured by the markets. They have it going to 1.6 trillion. I remember when you joined OpenAI and I asked you the question, can OpenAI get to a trillion dollars, right, in total value? And you said that is like if I thought it was just a trillion dollars I wouldn't be nearly as excited as I am about going to OpenAI. So when you just think about that and by the way less about market cap and right you know more about like the ambition and the opportunity and the impact and so that's what I want you to do just blue sky for us today. How long have you been at OpenAI now?
Okay. So, you're a year into this. A year in, do you think the opportunity is bigger than you thought when you started? And walk us through that a little bit.
I think it's bigger for sure than I realized. I think it's been in Sam's head the whole time. So, I'm not sure that there's been a revelation over the past year, but it's certainly opened my eyes. For one, we have grown faster than anything I've ever seen. And I thought I had seen fast growth when I was at Instagram for example.
And for those following at home on slide 24 in the deck, they show the user growth and we talked about it earlier, but it's just phenomenal.
So, and as we've grown, we're also deepening usage with the platform. People are using it more. So just from that perspective we are I think bigger today than I would have imagined.
They had a slide on that also. So and you said some comments on stage about you know as people use it more the minutes go up.
Yeah. Well I mean we look at weekly active users. That's sort of the metric that we goal ourselves by from a growth perspective. Obviously a lot of other things that we look at as well, but from a weekly active user, the reason we do that versus monthly is we don't want someone that just comes once a month. Once a month, that means we're probably not adding all that much value in their life if they're coming once a month. And over time, I think it's going to be more natural for us to measure daily active users because really, if we're doing our job, then you're using ChatGPT on a daily basis and hopefully multiple times per day because it can help you multiple times per day with all the different things that you encounter in your life. There's sort of the are you a monthly user, are you a weekly user, a daily user, and then on a given day, how much time are you spending in the product?
And you guys had a chart, your data, not ours, but that showed that people were using ChatGPT a whole lot more, you know, time in per day.
Yeah. And that's awesome. That's super exciting. That just means that we're actually helping people solve problems and they're not just using it, you know, like you go back a couple years when it launched, it was really good at various sorts of writing. If you're going to do copywriting, if you were going to have it summarize emails or things like that and you look today and it's so much broader. It can help in so many other areas. People are uploading, you know, actually my own son had a health thing. Had to have a minor surgery which was not that big of a deal. At least it was not supposed to be that big of a deal. But there was a tiny chance that there was something more serious, you know. And so he has the surgery. He's eight. Like next day he's playing a soccer game. He doesn't know any better. But then we're still waiting for like the biopsy of this thing to come back. And we end up getting a paper in the mail, a letter in the mail that has a whole bunch of like complex medical stuff on it, right? I'm like, you know, halfway educated. I couldn't make sense of it. I didn't know what it means. And I called the doctor and I couldn't get a hold of her. She was in a surgery, I think, and you know, she's busy. She's got a million things going on. And I'm looking at this and there's a bunch of like scary looking medical terms. And so the first thing I do of course is take a picture of it, upload it to ChatGPT and say, 'Hey, should I be worried about this?' And it comes back immediately. No, you're fine. This is like completely benign. Don't worry about it. You're all good. But I actually wasn't able to get a hold of the doctor for 72 hours. That would have been a really bad 72 hours for me as a parent sitting there stressing about this note. What you're describing, you know, as someone who's gone from once a day to 20 times a day. Like you learn what it can do. You learn the kinds of things it can do. Like you can take a photo of an appliance and ask it how to set the clock or something like that. And so one of the reasons I think it expands is people come to understand all the things it can do and all the kinds of prompts. You know another one is like I used to do a Google search, go to a web page, find a number and then put that into a formula and multiply it on a calculator. It can just do all that, right? Like you can say, right, go get this and run this. And now you can connect it to your email and your docs and your calendar and it can start to be useful in so many other ways. This, you know, what you used to have to go search through 20 docs for now you can go just ask for answers. So it's just so much more useful and I totally agree the way to sort of understand it because it's also constantly evolving, right? The models get step changes better every two or three months is you just start using it. You know, the number one advice I have for people when they ask what they should do with ChatGPT is just start using it because when you start using it for things and you take little tiny risks and try it for new things that you're not sure if it can do, you realize in most cases it can. And then it just becomes more and more helpful to you over time and I think the numbers reflect that.
When you see, so you're running product, your goal is to drive engagement, drive utility, thrill your customers. So talk to us about the things you're actively doing to take somebody from a monthly to a weekly, from a weekly to a daily. I'm sure a lot of this is happening organically as Bill describes, but I'm sure you're pressing on the flywheel. And then if we're at a billion monthlies today, like how do you set a measure for success for you and your team, right? Like do you have a goal, a big audacious goal, I want to get to two billion in three years. Like how are you thinking about that?
We do less sort of mechanical things of how do I get a monthly to a week. It's more like we have an incredible research team which is an absolutely world-class research team that's constantly iterating on models making the models suddenly able to do things that computers have never been able to do before in the history of computers. And so we think a lot more about how do we stay really tight with the research team because it's just this incredible nucleus of like creativity and discovery and how do we stay really close to them so that we can constantly be building products just on the edge of what the models can do, right? As our feeling is if we're building just on the edge of what models can do, then we suddenly have this product that can do things that no one's ever seen a product do before. And even if it's not perfect right when it starts because we believe in iterative deployment. We release early, we release often, like better to make lots of small mistakes and you know we kind of collectively as society understand what AI is good at, what it's bad at, how we work through it. We'd rather do that. And if you build a product that can do amazing things, even if it's only 70% good at that thing, in two or three months, the next model's going to come along and it's going to be 95% good at that thing, and all of a sudden, you've got something great, but we've sort of brought everybody along with us and learn from them at the same time. Like learn from the way they're using it. So, there's I think the thing that we've really tried to get right and we're not perfect at this, but I think we're a lot better than we used to be, is the really tight loop between research and product. Because when we have that loop, right, and we're solving products, the problems that people have, feedback goes back to research, the research team goes, 'Oh, it can't do that very well. Oh, we can fix that.' Right. And then the product gets better and we have that. Like, that's when magic happens.
You said something prophetic on stage today and simple, but it really caught me. You said today is the worst product from you. The model that you use today is the worst AI model that you'll ever use for the rest of your life. Yeah. Which is really it's a simple thing and it's really kind of obviously true when you think about it. But it just changes the way you think about building products because I think if you think about it the right way, it makes you much more open to building products that only kind of work. You know, whether you're us building ChatGPT and other products or whether you're an enterprise, you know, building some internal tool or because if the model can kind of do it, then it's going to be great at it in a few months. What things are you most excited about that are on the horizon?
