ChatGPT Has Investors Drooling--but Can It Bring Home the Bacon?

When ChatGPT--the ingenious, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged chatbot from OpenAI--was asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its responses included: "It is likely that its worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more." Microsoft, which is rumored to be weighing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI on top of an earlier $1 billion commitment, is betting that the company is worth a lot more--despite the fact neither ChatGPT nor other AI models made by OpenAI are yet raking in huge amounts of cash. OpenAI has built several impressive and attention-grabbing demos and powers a popular autocomplete function for coders offered by Microsoft's GitHub. But despite the hype swirling around its technology, the startup hasn't created a breakout, highly lucrative product or business. "We don't really know what ChatGPT is going to be great at," says James Cham, a partner at Bloomberg Beta, an investment firm.