OpenAI is evolving from a scrappy startup into a larger tech company.
The generative artificial intelligence company, best-known as the creator of ChatGPT, is looking to open next year an office in New York City, according to two people familiar with the plans. This would be the company's fifth office, added to its current headquarters in San Francisco, a just-opened office in Tokyo, and offices opened last year in London, and Dublin.
OpenAI has yet to settle on a space in New York or sign a lease, one of the people familiar said, but Manhattan and Brooklyn are being considered as options.
New offices are a clear sign of expansion for the company, which rose to public prominence only 18 months ago with the release of ChatGPT-3, a consumer-facing chatbot that can answer user queries and solve certain problems while mimicking human speech patterns and style.
It sparked an AI frenzy in Big Tech, with companies like Meta, Google and Amazon rushing to release their own generative AI products. Microsoft decided to make a massive investment in OpenAI that put ChatGPT in products like Bing and Copilot. After the dramatic ouster and return in November of cofounder and CEO Sam Altman, the company appears to be again on a steady growth trajectory.
Early last year, OpenAI had only about 400 employees all working out of one San Francisco office. It's now looking for a second office in San Francisco, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. This is in part because OpenAI's head count has grown to over 1,000 people, according to one of the people familiar with the company.
OpenAI has taken a selective approach to hiring, the person added, relative to how much interest the company receives for its job postings. Engineering jobs can receive over 1,000 applications for a single role, the person noted. Still, OpenAI is looking to grow even more this year, likely adding at least 500 people in the US and in still-new international offices, the person said.
While OpenAI is looking for technical talent and engineers, it's also looking to hire more enterprise salespeople to sell ChatGPT to large-scale customers, one of the people familiar said. The current sales team is considered small at around 150 people. Selling ChatGPT to large businesses is the core source of revenue for OpenAI and will remain as such going forward, the person noted, as OpenAI executives do not see a meaningful amount of revenue from individual user subscriptions to ChatGPT.
And new potential products to sell are on the horizon. There are two projects at the company right now among the core focus for OpenAI's tech engineers and employees. One is GPT-5, a new version of the large language model that underpins its popular chatbot and is poised to be released mid-year, as Business Insider reported. The other is a search product likely to incorporate Microsoft's Bing search engine, according to a report from The Information. That search product is still in development, according to one of the people familiar, and there is currently a significant push for workers on the project to deliver a search product, possibly by later this year.
With new offices and adding more workers, OpenAI is now one of the largest companies dedicated to generative AI. At around 1,000 employees, it's roughly the same size as Google DeepMind. Other generative AI startups like Mistral, Anthropic and Stability have between several dozen and a couple of hundred employees, according to LinkedIn.
A spokesperson for OpenAI did not respond to emails seeking comment.
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