Berber Jin

This is the first time in the company's history that it's faced such a big threat from one competitor, that competitor being Google.

Usage of their AI app called Gemini just skyrocketed.

I mean, they kind of dealt this blow to open AI in a way that they hadn't really before.

This is definitely a surprise to me because for the three years that I've been covering this company, their lead with ChatGPT has almost been a given.

If OpenAI can't figure out how to get over this bump, this blip, there's very high chance that OpenAI can't pay for those contracts or they just have trouble staying afloat financially.

But the one that changed everything for the company is, of course... ChatGPT, the most popular and fastest growing consumer app in internet history.

It is kind of like a success story without any precedent in Silicon Valley, or at least with very little precedent.

And their users grew from zero to over 800 million weekly users as of last month, which is an astonishing rate of growth.

And that story kind of powered its success within Silicon Valley.

The industry, people thought that for a long time that their lead was insurmountable.

And so it kind of turned OpenAI into this celebrity company in Silicon Valley that investors wanted to pour money into, big tech CEOs, you know, wanted to be associated with.

So in the spring of last year, OpenAI released a new model called 4.0, O standing for Omni, which means that the model can process not just text, but also audio and images.

And this model was very, very popular with users of ChatGPT.

People love talking to it.

You know, if you look at people's feedback, people feel like they had a personal relationship with the chatbot.

They felt like it understood them, their priorities.

The chatbot knew how to talk to them in the way that users liked.

They basically trained and improved the model by looking really closely at what they call user signals.

User signals.

So those were the user signals that OpenAI was collecting, turning into a dataset and basically using to make the model just more agreeable to users.