OpenAI offers AI for chip design, touts cost advantage over open-source, CFO says

OpenAI is pushing its AI into specialized ​industries and undercutting open-source ​rivals on cost, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said on ​Monday, as the ChatGPT maker sees accelerating enterprise growth.

Speaking at Goldman Sachs' Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco, Friar said OpenAI is focusing on sectors including chip design, ‌life sciences ⁠and financial ⁠services, as businesses increasingly seek AI systems tailored to specific tasks. It also is ​experimenting with pricing based on business outcomes rather than use, as more enterprises demand return ​on investment in AI.

The push into industry-specific AI and aggressive pricing reflects the growing competition OpenAI faces from Chinese open-weight models and rivals such ​as Anthropic, as enterprise customers demand more measurable ⁠returns from ‌AI spending.


Friar said OpenAI had a positive experience of ​its own, ​using its own models in developing its Jalapeno chip, ⁠which was "taped out", a stage when a chip design ​is finalized and sent to a factory for production, ​within nine months.

Open-source and open-weight models are widely seen as a cheaper alternative to frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Friar said OpenAI recently cut the price of its lower-cost Luna model by 80%, helping drive a roughly 10-fold increase in usage. OpenAI's Codex, its coding tool, is ‌attracting customers and has 25 million users, she said.

Friar said enterprise revenue increased 32% from June to July, compared with ​20% growth ​in overall annualized ⁠revenue during the period. Enterprise and consumer businesses had reached roughly an even split by the middle of the year, ahead of OpenAI's target of ​reaching that balance by year-end, she said.

Deploying OpenAI's lower-cost model could be cheaper than running Chinese open-source alternatives through cloud providers, she added.

"If you're deploying Luna and compare that to (Z.ai's) GLM 5.3, for example, on a cloud layer, we are cheaper," Friar said.