OpenAI is the first company to be #1 in the Disruptor 50 two years in a row

It’s the first on CNBC’s annual Disruptor 50 list: a company that lands at No. 1 for the second year in a row.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that company is OpenAI. More than any other startup in the 12-year history of the Disruptor 50 list, OpenAI’s disruptive impact and potential is unmatched.

What’s distinctive about the company and the AI ​​revolution it’s leading is that OpenAI doesn’t work in opposition to incumbents, but rather as a partner to tech giants and other large corporations. It serves as an ally to help navigate and implement unprecedented change, with new tools that can be customized for users and enterprise datasets.

OpenAI is not unique, but rather represents a generation of AI startups that are in line with the giants due to the computing power and massive funding needed to accelerate AI learning. In fact, 34 of this year’s Disruptor 50 companies describe AI as critical to more than half of their revenue. Thirteen says that it is generative AI that is critical to the majority of sales.

OpenAI tops the list for an unprecedented second year due to the company’s continued pace of innovation. Over the past year, OpenAI has grown dramatically, announcing a range of new products and services related to its GPT large language model and business partnerships, as a user subscription option and a range of corporate licensing deals have helped it generate reported $2 billion in annual revenue.

On Monday, OpenAI released a new AI model and a desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface. In a live broadcast, chief technology officer Mira Murati said the new model, the GPT-4o, is “much faster” with improved text, video and audio capabilities. “This is the first time we’ve really taken a huge step forward when it comes to ease of use,” Muratti said.

After a dramatic boardroom battle in November in which CEO Sam Altman was ousted and then reinstated just days later after an outcry from investors and employees, the company strengthened its board and management structure, with Altman himself joining back to the board in March. The struggle to rehire Altman and his team revealed the depth of corporate and venture capital support for the OpenAI CEO as an innovator and leader.

Then in February, the company debuted its Sora text-to-video generator (later in the year, an audio AI, Voice Engine, was also introduced in a limited test) and completed a funding round that valued the company at a reported $80 billion, down from a reported $29 billion by the time it was named #1 on the Disruptor 50 list in 2023.

Altman has positioned himself as a thought leader on AI regulation after testifying last year before Congress about the need for smart and thoughtful AI guardrails. And the company is at the center of a maelstrom of concern about artificial intelligence. OpenAI is at the center of regulatory scrutiny, with the Federal Trade Commission investigating whether it violated consumer protection laws and the SEC investigating whether investors were misled during Altman’s brief ouster. Meanwhile, the company has beefed up its legal team as it battles a number of lawsuits, from publishing companies including The New York Times and individual artists, such as author Jodi Picoult, suing for copyright infringement.

But at the same time, OpenAI struck new deals with publisher IAC Meredith, parent of Food & Wine and People, and the Financial Times to compensate them for using their IP address and drive traffic back to their content.

The wave of AI is spreading to many industries

This wave of AI innovation echoes that of the rise of the Internet at the turn of the century and the mobile and cloud revolutions, but has some distinct characteristics. The current wave of AI disruptors, such as Databricks (#5 on this year’s list), Anthropic (#7), Scale AI (#12), Cohere (#30), AlphaSense (#40), and Glean (#43) feature rapid rate of change, with the progress made every year by large language models, as well as their dependence on expensive chips and infrastructure.

Unlike the garage startup mythology that dominated the Googles and PayPals of previous tech cycles, these AI-driven companies need GPUs and data centers, which has led most of them to partner with giants ranging from Microsoft and Nvidia to Oracle, Salesforce, Amazon and Alphabet. As a result, we may not see as many new entrants to the AI ​​sector as so-called Web 1.0 and 2.0, but the companies that succeed, like those on our Disruptor 50 list, have the potential to be much more impactful and disruptive.

This year’s Disruptor 50 companies are using AI — and other key technologies, such as robotics and the cloud — across a wide range of industries.

Enterprise technology is the best-represented sector, with 14 companies on this year’s list, including Databricks and AlphaSense, which use AI to increase efficiency and better mine data in key industries such as finance.

Fintech is the second best-represented sector with 10 companies on this year’s list, including Brex (No. 4), Chime (No. 22) and Ramp (No. 32), which have integrated AI assistants to streamline user interactions, generate suggestions and advise on effective corporate budgeting.

In healthcare and biotech, there are eight companies, including ElevateBio (No. 8), Generate Biomedicines (No. 25) and Spring Health (No. 45), using AI to accelerate drug development and improve patient outcomes.

And we see AI powering the space and defense industries. Number 2 on the list, Anduril, recently unveiled new AI-powered drones and is using an AI-powered operating system to infuse autonomy into a range of defense and security systems.

Just as every company, regardless of industry, has become a technology company, very soon every type of company will integrate AI.