OpenAI’s revenue growth has been extremely impressive: from <$1B to >$10B in only three years. Still, a few other companies have pulled off similar growth. We found four such US companies in the past fifty years. Of these, only Google went on to top $100B in revenue.

But OpenAI has also projected revenue of $100B in 2028. We found seven companies which achieved revenue growth from $10B to $100B in under a decade. None of them did it in six years, let alone three.

To hit this target, OpenAI needs to 2× their revenue three years in a row. The most promising comparison is Nvidia, which, starting from a base of $28B, saw revenue growth just over 2× in both 2023 and 2024. No other company-year in the chart above had growth ≥ 2×.

Can OpenAI do it? One reason for optimism is that their revenue is growing very quickly right now: 3×/year and no signs of slowing. That leaves some breathing room.

Where would the revenue come from? Probably a mix of ChatGPT subscriptions and taking ads and shopping market share from Google, Meta, and Amazon. The longer-term goal of productivity uplift and automation offers a bigger pie, but may be harder to unlock in just three years.

In any case, we’ll be watching OpenAI’s revenue closely. This Gradient Update was written by @GregHBurnham. You can read the full post here: https://epoch.ai/gradient-upda...

Did we miss a company that should be on one of these charts? Let us know! We do mention a couple more in the full post (ByteDance, Gilead Sciences).

@EpochAIResearch Getting away with painting a hockey stick on the chart 🤣

@EpochAIResearch Yeah, but they have created a web of interdependencies securing funding regardless of revenue

@EpochAIResearch They can pull it off.

@EpochAIResearch I'm surprised Walmart grew so quickly

@EpochAIResearch AI bubble or next big thing? Clip it

One of the first randomized controlled trials testing whether GenAI boosts revenue, not just productivity. It does. A large, mature ecommerce platform, using older GenAI tools found most of them, from customer service to marketing tools, led to large significant revenue boosts

faster, cheaper, better.

We're in a strange spot right now with AI. The anti-AI crowd believes progress has halted and are doing a victory lap. Insiders at all labs maintain advancement continues at pace. Only one of these versions of reality will survive the new year. Gemini 3 is very close now.

An exciting milestone for AI in science: Our C2S-Scale 27B foundation model, built with @Yale and based on Gemma, generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells.  With more preclinical and clinical tests,