Reporter on OpenAI revenue flap: post-Astra growth is real
A reporter says OpenAI leaders are pleased with revenue growth after the Astra launch, but comms teams often give reporters an incomplete picture, which leads to outside misreading.
To understand this OpenAI revenue mess, you just have to understand two things. 1) In recent weeks, OpenAI leaders have been very pleased about their revenue growth and sharing a lot of momentum stats privately. It's sort of felt to me like an off the record whisper effort to show revenue has been picking up post Astra and to (perhaps) spit a little in the Anthropic IPO. I believe the uptick is real and I think the company was hoping that some of that momentum would leak more publicly. 2) Reporters are getting WAY too much false confidence in guidance from comms teams. This is not unique to this situation. Increasingly, I have felt that even when they are well-intended, we cannot trust what many comms teams across the industry are saying, in part because they don't always have the full picture. And yet many reporters take guidance from these teams as confirmation. So 1 + 2 equals this silly moment.