In mid-November, OpenAI’s board fired the CEO of the company, Sam Altman, the guy who put ChatGPT on the map and ushered in a new era of corporate AI deployments. Within the next three days, nearly all of the company’s employees said they’d walk out the door, and the fate of OpenAI looked extremely uncertain.
Entire businesses have been built on top of OpenAI and its APIs.
According to an O’Reilly survey released late last month, 23% of companies are using one of OpenAI’s models. Its closest commercial competitor, Google’s Bard, is far behind, with just 1% of the market. Other respondents said they aren’t using any generative AI models, are building their own, or are using an open-source alternative.
Putting aside the fact this is an astronomically high adoption rate for a brand new technology, it’s also an indicator of how risky this space is. An enterprise that bet its future on ChatGPT would be in serious trouble if the tool disappeared and all of OpenAI’s APIs suddenly stopped working. So if OpenAI came within a hair’s breadth of collapsing overnight, what does this say about the survival odds of the innumerable start-ups in this space?
According to G2’s latest state of software report, AI is the fastest-growing software category in G2 history. The company now tracks a total of 1,078 AI vendors, and AI categories gained 643 new products over the previous year.
