Over the weekend, OpenAI’s chief new revenue officer, Denise Dresser, sent a memo to employees meant to detail the company’s strategy going forward, but somehow ended up spending a considerable amount of ink on how little the company thinks of Anthropic. The memo, reported on by The Verge, included some direct shots at OpenAI’s biggest rival, including claiming that Anthropic has been juicing its revenue figures.
Per the memo, Dresser claimed that Anthropic uses “accounting treatment that makes revenue look bigger than it is,” and that has given a false impression of how long the company’s run rate is. Just last week, Bloomberg reported Anthropic’s annualized revenue is trending over $30 billion. OpenAI is throwing cold water on that, claiming that it believes Anthropic is overstating its situation by about $8 billion, dropping it to $22 billion. And wouldn’t you know it, that puts Anthropic behind OpenAI, which has a reported run rate of around $24 billion.
One of the objections that Dresser took with Anthropic’s alleged revenue included “grossing up” revenue-sharing agreements that the company has with Google and Amazon, instead of using net revenue figures.
Funnily enough, though, part of the reason for Dresser’s memo stems from OpenAI’s own arrangement with Amazon. The giant online retailer just recently announced plans to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, which has given the firm new life as its status as a leader in the AI space slips away. In the memo, Dresser blamed OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft as a hurdle that “limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are.”
With all that in mind, Dresser seems to believe that OpenAI still compares favorably in terms of its position in the market compared to rival Anthropic. While she acknowledged that Anthropic has a significant lead among enterprise customers thanks to its advantage in coding, she believes it’s a tactical error for Anthropic to make a point of emphasis that its service actually generates revenue. “You do not want to be a single-product company in a platform war,” she wrote.
She also took shots at the company’s leadership, claiming that Anthropic is “built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI.”
That’s an interesting narrative to come out of OpenAI, which hasn’t exactly been immune to this type of posturing. Back when OpenAI launched, Altman specifically said, “I sleep better knowing I can have some influence now.” In recent years, the company has spent much of its lobbying money to fight federal regulations that would put guardrails on its products. Kinda seems like the objection isn’t so much about a small group of elites controlling AI and more about who’s in the group.
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