OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, is pushing back against recent reports suggesting the company is missing internal financial targets. Friar stated that OpenAI is not only meeting its objectives but is also experiencing immense demand for its products, describing it as “a vertical wall of demand.”
In an interview on Thursday, Friar affirmed, “We feel like we’re beating our plan at the highest level.” She explained that while the methods to achieve these goals might shift, it’s typical for a young and rapidly evolving business like OpenAI. Forecasting every single metric precisely is challenging in such a dynamic environment.
The company faced scrutiny earlier this week after a report in The Wall Street Journal claimed OpenAI had fallen short of its internal revenue and user growth targets. This included an ambitious goal of reaching one billion weekly active users by the end of 2025. The article also hinted that Friar had concerns about the company’s ability to fund its future computing needs if sales didn’t accelerate enough.
Following the report’s publication, shares of several OpenAI investors and partners saw a decline, highlighting the company’s significant influence in the burgeoning AI economy. OpenAI quickly dismissed the report as “prime clickbait,” asserting that its business was “firing on all cylinders.”
Friar acknowledged that OpenAI, like many companies, sets ambitious “stretch goals” internally, which can differ from those shared publicly. However, she emphasized that the popularity of OpenAI’s offerings continues to soar. For instance, the company recently announced that its coding agent, Codex, now boasts 4 million weekly users, a significant jump from 3 million just two weeks prior.
“Every company I’ve ever been inside of in my entire CFO life, and as an analyst, always has stretch goals,” Friar said. “And if you don’t have those stretch goals, I feel like, actually, you’re not doing your job as a CFO.”
Friar also directly addressed and refuted the idea that she believes OpenAI might require less computing infrastructure. On the contrary, she asserted that data center capacity is precisely what OpenAI needs more of to keep up with its growth.
“We’re going up a vertical wall of demand right now,” Friar explained. “If we’re in places where we’re not hitting like targets, at the moment, I would actually say it’s lack of compute that often is the thing that’s slowing us down to some degree.” This aligns with CEO Sam Altman’s previous statements that the company will eventually need to invest trillions of dollars in infrastructure to support and expand its AI services.
