The Flywheel Is Compounding

Welcome (back) to The Prompt. We’re recapping recent updates, sharing what’s top of mind for us, and calling out favorite ways in which everyday people are using our tools.

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The early bets we’ve made are paying off, and more importantly, starting to reinforce one another. The result is more people having access to AI to create opportunity and solve problems for themselves and others.

For years, we’ve been building toward something more ambitious than a single AI product or even a single AI business. The pieces are coming together: a massive platform for consumers and businesses; a growing advertising business; hardware that can create entirely new ways to interact with AI; and a compute-and-infrastructure buildout designed for the scale of what comes next.

That’s the flywheel. More compute lets us build better models and products. Better products bring more users and more ways to generate revenue. That growth supports a broader, more diversified business. Of the 1 billion, more than half are women; we have more adult users both under and over the age of 30 than any other frontier lab; and more earn under $100,000 (like much of the global population) than over $100,000.

And that business gives us the resources to invest in still more compute, research, products, and distribution. Each piece makes the others stronger.

Our diversification is thus about more than resilience. It reflects the scale of our ambition. We’re building across consumer, enterprise, developers, advertising, hardware, and infrastructure because we think AI will become a foundational layer of the economy – and the opportunity is bigger than any one interface, customer segment, or business model.

Building something this ambitious, this quickly, also comes with change. Organizations evolve and new leaders come in as their missions, products, and scale evolve, and ours is doing all three unusually fast.

But the people driving the next chapter are already at the helm. Our founders and leaders are focused on turning a collection of big bets into an integrated company, one where research drives products, products drive adoption, adoption drives growth, and growth funds the infrastructure that starts the cycle again.

The story isn’t that OpenAI has a lot of different businesses. It’s that they’re increasingly becoming one business.

The benefits of AI shouldn’t be limited to the people who already know how to use it.

That’s why a big part of our work is getting our tools directly into the hands of people and organizations, helping them understand what AI can do and giving them the skills to put it to work for themselves. This week alone:

• Today, the OpenAI Academy held AI training to support nonprofits involved in the ongoing Altadena fire recovery.

• We did ChatGPT 101 trainings with the Congressional Institute, helping around 200 congressional staffers on practical ways of using ChatGPT to do their work faster and more effectively.

• We trained political journalists on ways they can use AI in their work as they cover the 2026 midterms. We also worked with nearly 100 journalists attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta. Journalists in the room asked how to give ChatGPT clear instructions that produce stronger editorial work and how to protect personal information.

• Our OpenAI Forum explored how AI can expand what small businesses can do, showing practical AI demonstrations from two small business owners.

Different audiences, different needs, but the same basic idea: AI becomes more valuable as more people have the opportunity and know-how to use it.

• User stories we love: Megan Allred uses ChatGPT to juggle work, family, volunteering, and even 1,000-person fundraisers. Elsewhere, ChatGPT helped a woman recognize that a persistent cough needed medical attention, flagging a case later diagnosed as pneumonia; spotted a bogus $122.50 charge on a car-repair estimate; helped would-be buyers uncover problems with a $1 million home before making an offer; and helped a 75-year-old with no coding experience build his own desktop AI companion.

• Putting frontier cyber models in more trusted hands: We expanded the Daybreak Cyber Partner Program, bringing our most advanced cyber models to leading security providers so more organizations can find serious vulnerabilities, prioritize what matters, and fix them faster.

• From assistance to execution: Two new OpenAI studies show how businesses are moving beyond asking AI questions and increasingly using agents to carry out substantive work, with the heaviest-using firms pulling further ahead in adoption.

Graphics created by Base Three using ChatGPT.