GM Readers! ☀️

Welcome to the 25th issue of Evolving Internet Insights.

This week we cover the latest in ChatGPT Enterprise progress, how well AI consumer apps did in 2023, an AI assistant in your pocket, and humanoid robots that fold your laundry. 🤔

Thanks for reading!

Liang and Dan 🙌

💾 Byte-sized Stories

This week’s top stories with our insights on top.

260: Number of Customers Paying for ChatGPT Enterprise 🏢

⚡️ TL;DR: ChatGPT introduced an enterprise tier about four months ago and COO Brad Lightcap highlighted in an interview that there are over 260 paying enterprise customers which equates to about 150K enterprise users. 

⚡️ So What: The big selling points for ChatGPT Enterprise for companies are the added features around privacy and security. While OpenAI doesn’t state how much ChatGPT Enterprise costs, a quick search on Reddit shows a $60 per month per seat price tag. If true across this customer base, then the 150K enterprise users would generate an annualized revenue of ~$108M for OpenAI. An impressive top line figure considering this product launched 4 months ago, and that there is likely still an extensive waitlist of AI-ravenous companies.

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7,500: Number of Apps That Added “Chatbot” and “GPT” to Their Descriptions 🤖

⚡️ TL;DR: Total consumer spending in mobile app stores reached $171B in 2023 (up 3% from the previous year). Riding the AI hype and frenzy, 7,500+ apps pitched their apps as AI apps by using some of the popular buzzwords, per a data.ai study.

⚡️ So What: This 3% jump is worth the headlines considering the app economy slowed for the first time ever in 2022. Now, with 2023 in the rearview mirror, AI-related apps drove much of this year’s growth. The data.ai study went on to highlight that of the 20 apps they studied that adopted AI features into their products saw a 11% year over year increase in downloads.

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$100M: Series B funding raised by 1X 🦾

⚡️ TL;DR: 1X is a company building humanoid robots powered by AI to augment a labor shortage. In April 2023, it raised $23.5M led by OpenAI and in its most recent funding round raised $100M led by EQT Ventures.

⚡️ So What: While talking about humanoid robots feels like stuff of the future, a bunch of companies are looking to make this a reality. This urgency is underscored by the fact that many foundational industries such as food services and hospitality are having a hard time retaining their workers. This week, Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, showed off its ability to fold laundry. Though, it is worth noting Optimus’ actions were pre-scripted, not fully autonomous, and clearly unaware of the wrinkles in its folds. 👕

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$199: Cost of the Viral Rabbit R1 AI Assistant 🐰

⚡️ TL;DR: Rabbit, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup, recently announced its handheld personal voice assistant powered by its own proprietary foundation model—what they call their “Large Action Model.” Since its launch last week, it has sold out of pre-order availability for two production runs.

⚡️ So What: The thesis behind CEO Jesse Lyu's product vision for the Rabbit R1 is that modern day smartphones and app ecosystems are difficult to use for tasks. The R1 represents a pocket assistant powered by an AI model that can seamlessly navigate app interfaces to perform tasks with voice prompts from the user (check it out here). Only time will tell whether hardware-based personal AI assistants such as the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Ai Pin will surge as a viable product category in the minds of users. 

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2024: OpenAI’s Approach to This Year’s Elections 🗳️

⚡️ TL;DR: In addition to enforcing new usage policies, OpenAI is taking the non-traditional step of proactively announcing its plan to combat election misinformation worldwide in 2024. New features such as incorporating digital provenance frameworks with DALL-E-generated images and ChatGPT partnering with NASS, directing users to CanIVote.org, are included in this plan. 

⚡️ So What: As we reported earlier in ⚡Insights 23, a whopping 1B voters will head to the polls this year. A lot will be at stake for democracies around the world. Counter to the latest hands-off approaches by Big Tech platforms such as Meta and X (f.k.a. Twitter) to managing election misinformation, OpenAI’s announcement seems to be a step in the right direction as far as a company with a massive user base goes. How OpenAI handles election interference, misinformation, and transparency will affect all of us. 

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📊 Let’s Get Graphic

One visual we couldn’t stop thinking about.

genAI App Weekly Consumer Spend Reached Nearly $6m in 2023 📈

⚡️ Takeaway: GenAI consumer apps reached a weekly consumer spend of $4M - $6M. Per the data.AI study, most of this spend was on chatbot and art generator apps, which are two of the leading use cases for consumer AI apps in 2023. Key challenges of building anything in the consumer space is user retention and engagement, which will be interesting metrics to watch in 2024.

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🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole

Some deeper dives to help you get smarter on emerging tech.

1. App Economy 2023: Deep dive chock full of metrics for what happened in the App-based economy in 2023. 

2. AI and Intellectual Property Rights: Deep dive highlighting how AI changes and necessitates a new intellectual property paradigm.

3. AI Canon: a curated list of resources that Andreessen Horowitz has used to get smarter about modern AI.

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