When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, startling the technology world, he described it as like being ‘hit in the head with a brick’. The firing of Sam Altman, the now former CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT on Friday evening sent a similarly sized shockwave across the technology industry.
To hold a company whose product has been available for only a year in the same light as Apple, the most valuable public company in the world may seem like hyperbole, but the comparison is not entirely unfair. ChatGPT is perhaps the fastest growing software product of all time. While it took Netflix 3.5 years to get to 100 million users, and Facebook 10 months, it took just 5 days from its release for ChatGPT to reach that milestone - with OpenAI’s revenues rumoured to have surpassed $1 Billion in its first year since commercial launch.
