OpenAI Shifts Its Focus to Business Users Amid Anthropic Pressure

The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her emails and Slack messages.

Friar and other company executives are banking OpenAI’s future on more of the latter as it shifts its focus to business-oriented products while shedding some of its consumer offerings as a pathway to profitability.

OpenAI says it will introduce a new artificial intelligence model for “high-value professional work” as the company faces heightened competition with rival Anthropic in attracting corporate customers to adopt AI assistants in their workplaces.

“You’ll see a new model coming from us in short order. We feel very excited about it,” Friar said in an interview with The Associated Press.

OpenAI boasts of more than 900 million weekly users of its core ChatGPT product, and Friar said about 95% of them “don’t pay anything” for the popular chatbot. But while all those interactions build habits and reliance, they also strain the costly computing resources needed to power the company’s AI systems and highlight the need for big business customers to help pay the bills. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic, valued at $380 billion, both lose more money than they make, putting the privately-owned San Francisco-based AI research laboratories in a fierce competition to generate more revenue as they race toward becoming publicly traded on Wall Street. A push to improve performance and sales of OpenAI’s business-oriented products — already Anthropic’s bread and butter — has driven OpenAI to abandon some consumer initiatives, like the AI video generator app Sora.“I think it was a little heartbreaking, but we’re like, OK, it’s not the main event right now,” Friar said. “We need to make sure that our new model that’s coming has enough compute.” Codenamed Spud, OpenAI says its “smartest model yet” offers “stronger reasoning, better understanding of intent and dependencies, better follow-through and more reliable output in production.” It will be part of OpenAI’s answer to Anthropic’s new Claude Mythos, which Anthropic claims is so “strikingly capable” that it is limiting its use to select customers because of its apparent ability to surpass human cybersecurity experts in finding or exploiting computer vulnerabilities.While most people can’t use Mythos, Anthropic also on Thursday released Opus 4.7, describing it as its most powerful “generally available” model. 

OpenAI hours later introduced its own new specialized model called GPT-Rosalind, named after scientist Rosalind Franklin, that’s designed to advance drug discovery and other life sciences research.