openai’s annual revenue exceeded US$1.6 billion, and the U.S. stock market was doing very well. The Nasdaq index, which is dominated by technology stocks, soared by 43% at the end of the year. 2023 is about to come to an end. What kind of big changes will the AI industry usher in in 2024?
2023 will undoubtedly be a crazy year for the technology industry.
In 2023, when the global economy is facing a recession and conflicts continue around the world, the Nasdaq index, dominated by technology stocks, has bucked the trend and soared 43%, almost reaching its historical high in 2021.
Among them, Nvidia surged 239%, meta surged 200%, Amazon surged 81%, and Microsoft surged 58%.
The popular openai, which almost single-handedly triggered this wave of generative AI, was valued at US$100 billion one year after the release of chatgpt.
has become the third largest unicorn in the world after spacex!
More than two years ago, it was even a non-profit organization. In November this year, the company was almost dissolved due to governance structure reasons.
But the latest news is that based on openai’s revenue in the past two months, annualized revenue has reached a record high of 1.6 billion US dollars. According to OpenAI's internal forecast, next year's revenue will likely double several times to reach US$5 billion. After the farce on the board of directors in November, users did not leave openai.
According to foreign media reports, in November and December, openai’s revenue increased by 20%, allowing their annualized revenue to eventually reach 1.6 billion US dollars.
In recent financing news, openai’s valuation has reached US$100 billion. The ratio of valuation to annual revenue reaches 62 times. The multiple of
is not high for a fast-growing AI startup, and it still has great growth potential in the future.
And openai’s internal executives predict that the company’s revenue will reach more than 5 billion US dollars in 2024, continuing to maintain strong growth.
The strong growth in OpenAI's revenue and valuation has caused employees' stock options to appreciate significantly, allowing some employees' annual package income to reach more than 10 million US dollars.
The beneficiaries of openai’s rapid revenue growth are far more than just openai themselves and their employees.
As the largest investor in openai, Microsoft will also receive a very considerable profit share in the future. All the technologies behind the
openai large model are supported by Microsoft Data Center. At the same time, Microsoft takes a commission from the revenue earned by openai.
Thanks to its investment in openai, Microsoft is currently the only large cloud service provider that can sell openai services.
In addition, Microsoft invested US$10 billion at the beginning of this year. If openai achieves profitability, Microsoft will also receive a considerable profit share.
At the same time, other well-known start-up investors, including Thrive, also bought shares of OpenAI.
Rumor has it that after the altman farce, some companies that rely on the openai model to produce products began to consider switching to multiple suppliers.
Therefore, the revenue and valuation of companies like Anthropic that provide similar services to OpenAI are also growing.
According to data revealed by foreign media, Anthropic’s monthly revenue reached US$17 million in its latest financing, and the ratio of valuation to annualized revenue reached 75 times, even higher than OpenAI.
In the future, as more and more large model companies join, the entire industry will continue to grow, but competition will also become increasingly fierce.
openai and Microsoft have proven that conversational AI powered by large models can become a big business.
But it is unclear how much the future potential of these models can be improved, nor how much funding is needed to achieve this.
Engineers at OpenAI have recently been excited about a breakthrough that allowed one of their models to solve mathematical problems that had never been seen before.
To be clear, openai is not the only option in ai games. Early customers say they are looking for suppliers with better prices.
In addition, other well-funded technology giants such as Google and Amazon are also launching competing AI.
#02
U.S. technology stocks soared 43%, and Nvidia became the biggest winner
The entire U.S. technology stock market delivered its best performance in the past 20 years in 2023 .
After plunging 33% last year, the tech-heavy Nasdaq ended 2023 up 43%. It was its best year since 2020, with slightly higher gains.
This increase is also slightly lower than the performance in 2009. This is the only two years since 2003 that the growth rate has been larger.
The Nasdaq is currently just 6.5% below its record high set in November 2021.
In addition to the macro environment and low borrowing cost ratio, which have greatly promoted the development of the technology industry, the emergence of generative AI has also stimulated enthusiasm in the technology industry.
Nvidia is the biggest winner in this AI boom.
According to statistics, large cloud providers and start-ups have been snapping up GPUs this year, causing Nvidia's stock price to soar 239% in 2023.
In the first three quarters of 2023, Nvidia generated net income of US$17.5 billion, an increase of more than 6 times from the previous year. Revenue tripled in the most recent quarter.
I still remember what Huang once said at the GTC conference in March: "The 'iphone moment' of artificial intelligence has arrived."
It was the emergence of chatgpt that triggered a wave of explosions in the technology industry.
Microsoft, Google, meta, and Amazon have received huge investments in embedding generative AI into their own product suites and touting AI capabilities.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company's earnings call in October that generative AI could bring tens of billions of dollars in revenue to AWS in the coming years.
It’s worth mentioning that Amazon shares are up 81% in 2023, their best year since 2015.
Microsoft investors have enjoyed a rally this year not seen since 2009, with the software company's stock up 58%.
In addition to its investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has also integrated this technology into products such as Bing, Office, and Windows. Copilot became the iconic product of its extensive production-oriented AI, turning Microsoft into the global "copilot company."
After landing on Android, copilot is officially launched on the ios system today.
The best CEO, Lao Huang is none other than
"The Economist" also selected the outstanding CEO in 2023 at the end of the year.
To judge who is the best, The Economist examined the performance of CEOs of large public companies included in the S&P Global 1200 Index.
At the same time, CEOs with less than 3 years of service were eliminated from the evaluation, and then ranked according to the benefits they created for shareholders compared with the average level of their industry.
Among the top ten selected by them, there are both well-known names and little-known dark horses.
As for the best CEO in the world, it is Huang Renxun.
iconic leather jacket, this image of Huang Jen-Hsun has become the most familiar scene in the public image.
It is reported that, like Steve, he is passionate about work and pursues ultimate perfection. Despite the strict requirements, it is loved by employees and has a praise rate of 98%.
#03
Next year, ai big events
2023 ai development officially ended, in the next year, what earth-shaking changes will happen to the technology industry . The latest report by
information predicts major events in the AI field in 2024.
Microsoft openai will break
Generally speaking, the relationship between Microsoft and openai is elusive. They are allies and enemies. When
openai was a young startup, striking a deal with a well-funded tech giant like Microsoft might have sounded like a good idea.
But now, OpenAI’s annual revenue has exceeded 1.5 billion US dollars, and it may not be so attractive to compete with Microsoft for the same customers.
information believes that the two companies will have a very public showdown next year, even if OpenAI continues to rely on Microsoft's servers and chips.
Just a few days ago, Forbes made the same prediction.
ai darling will go bankrupt or be quickly acquired
In the past few months, there has been talk of a "Tale of Two Cities" (legal tech startup harvey).
While promising moneymakers like legal tech startup Harvey and enterprise search company Glean have been able to raise funding, riskier startups have struggled.
Companies in the second category, including model provider StabilityAl and copywriting startup Jasper, will encounter more challenges in 2024 as funding becomes more difficult, which may put the company up for sale.
In addition, major model developers openai, anthropoc, cohere, a121 labs or you.com are also likely to be acquired.
But they may get a good price from technology companies such as Salesforce and Oracle that want to rebrand themselves as innovators.
The explosion of models that are not based on transformers
Everyone knows that behind the current large models such as gpt-4 and claude, they all use a unified transformer architecture. The essence of
transformer is to predict the most likely next word in a sentence. However, this type of model has been criticized as a "random parrot" rather than a real inference problem.
In addition, their training and running costs are also staggeringly high.
In addition to transformer, some other alternative models have gradually attracted everyone's attention recently, such as the new open source mamba model, whose architecture makes it more computationally efficient than transformer.
Therefore, whether it is mamba or other models, the AI industry is looking forward to the emergence of another model.
ai generates misinformation that will undermine elections
Artificial intelligence-generated misinformation has become a problem in politics. It can be predicted that some error messages generated by AI will become popular.
Currently, companies such as openai are still exploring methods of content review. The images generated by
ai are very realistic, and we have seen how difficult it is to recognize AI-written text. Due to low accuracy, opena even had to shut down its own detection tool.
Generative AI enters the "physical world"
So far, the results of generative artificial intelligence models have mainly appeared through chat robots and discord servers.
information believes that in 2024, they will enter the real world through wearable devices and robots that can recognize objects and display multi-modal capabilities.
We have begun to see companies such as meta and Microsoft exploring wearable devices such as headsets and glasses powered by large models.
In addition, according to Bloomberg, Sam Altman is working on a mysterious AL device project with iPhone designer Jony Ive, and the project has just received help from another Apple veteran and is exploring the possibility of developing a home device.
This isn’t the only hardware project Altmann is excited about. Openal also invested this year in 1x Technologies, a Norwegian robotics company that uses language and autonomous movement artificial intelligence models in its humanoid robots.
In recent months, Apple has also accelerated the pace of developing conversational artificial intelligence. Perhaps it will release a series of LLM-related news for iPhone and Mac in 2024.
Judges and legislators will increasingly influence the AI industry
A large number of artificial intelligence regulations are likely to be introduced in recent months.
The U.S. government’s executive order in October could force companies to ensure that their artificial intelligence systems cannot be used to create biological or nuclear weapons, embed watermarks on AI-generated content and disclose foreign customers to the government.
At the a.i. safety summit held in the UK, 28 countries, including China, agreed to cooperate to prevent "catastrophic risks."
During marathon negotiations in December, the EU drafted the world's first bill to restrict the use of artificial intelligence, including restrictions on facial recognition and deepfakes, and defining how companies can use artificial intelligence. The final text will be published in early 2024, with the EU's 27 member states hoping to ratify it before European Parliament elections in June.
Openai is also facing a lawsuit from the New York Times regarding chatgpt infringement. The judge’s attitude will determine how much price Openai and Microsoft will have to pay to continue to develop large-model products.
ai capabilities will continue to soar
The key breakthrough in artificial intelligence in 2024 will be "inference", enabling machines to produce more accurate results. By 2025, artificial intelligence will be the most effective tool in reasoning.
By 2024, model capabilities will increase by 10 to 100 times. There is perhaps no way to predict the innovative capabilities this will bring.
Finally, we finish with a list of major events in 2023.
