OpenAI’s 2026 ‘focus’ is ‘practical adoption’
As the company spends a huge amount of money on infrastructure, OpenAI is working to close the gap on what AI can do and how people actually use it.
As the company spends a huge amount of money on infrastructure, OpenAI is working to close the gap on what AI can do and how people actually use it.
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Image: The Verge
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
OpenAI plans to focus on “practical adoption” of AI in 2026, according to a blog post from CFO Sarah Friar. As the company spends a huge amount of money on infrastructure, OpenAI is working on “closing the gap” on what AI can do and how people actually use it. “The opportunity is large and immediate, especially in health, science, and enterprise, where better intelligence translates directly into better outcomes.”
Much of the blog post, titled “A business that scales with the value of intelligence,” is about how OpenAI has evolved since it launched ChatGPT and how it has scaled up its business. The company’s weekly active user and daily active user metrics “continue to produce all-time highs,” thanks to a “flywheel” across “compute, frontier research, products, and monetization,” according to Friar. However, the company is also investing a lot on infrastructure, having made about $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments as of November of last year.
OpenAI announced last week that it will be bringing ads to the platform soon and launched the cheaper ChatGPT Go subscription worldwide. Where OpenAI’s business model goes next will “extend beyond what we already sell,” Friar says:
As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path.
This system requires discipline. Securing world-class compute requires commitments made years in advance, and growth does not move in a perfectly smooth line. At times, capacity leads usage. At other times, usage leads capacity. We manage that by keeping the balance sheet light, partnering rather than owning, and structuring contracts with flexibility across providers and hardware types. Capital is committed in tranches against real demand signals. That lets us lean forward when growth is there without locking in more of the future than the market has earned.
Perhaps some of the “practical adoption” for ChatGPT could come in the form of the hardware devices OpenAI is building in partnership with Jony Ive, with the first device potentially being shown off later this year.
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