Sarah Friar

Masters of Scale · Reid Hoffman and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar on where AI goes from here

• Why Did OpenAI Pay for School Lunches?

  Sarah Friar says OpenAI paid for free school lunches because a Georgia community asked for them out of an $80 million grant.

  Reid Hoffman asked where she was going next. She was on her way to Savannah, Georgia, to meet the community around a new site that will become a large data center. She says data centers can be a contentious conversation locally, and they can also bring skilled jobs. In Abilene, Texas, she says the work brings electricians and HVAC jobs, and many unions are excited about what is coming. In Georgia, OpenAI gave the community an $80 million grant to deploy over five years, and the community chooses the use. The first request that came to her was free school dinners or fr

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• What Percent of ChatGPT Users Ask Health Questions?

  Sarah Friar says about a third of ChatGPT's 1.2 billion weekly users ask a health or wellness question every week.

  Reid Hoffman asked what OpenAI is doing to earn trust when people cannot tell what is going on. Friar says trust is earned, and healthcare is where OpenAI has a strong footing because people already trust AI and healthcare together. In health deserts such as West Texas, she says the share using ChatGPT for health or wellness can reach 80 to 90 percent, not a third. Boston Children's Hospital gave OpenAI genetic data, diagnostic data, and scientific literature, along with more than 300 diseases that had no resolution yet. She says the work has reached 40 of them, which means ans

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• Why Is ChatGPT Free?

  Sarah Friar says ChatGPT stays free for about 90% of its 1.2 billion weekly users because OpenAI is building a business that can pay for that access.

  She says the 1.2 billion people are about a fifth of the world's population. Some of them ask what to cook for a picky kid. Others use it for something life-changing. Use is moving from asking, the chat moment, to doing, the agentic moment, and on to a virtual coworker. OpenAI had just announced 100,000 advertisers on the platform, in 89 countries. Friar says the ads are why a free tier can exist. The mission is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not only for people who can pay or who live inside a corporation.

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• What Share of a Job Do People Use ChatGPT for?

  Sarah Friar says people use ChatGPT for only about 40% of what their job title says, because the work inside a job is changing along with the job.

  She uses finance to make the pattern concrete. Someone with a finance job title does about 25% of their tasks on ChatGPT as truly financial work, like running a DCF or a treasury reconciliation. Another 25% of the tasks are engineering. Sarah Friar says the engineering share means everyone has now become a builder.

  Speaking for herself, Sarah Friar says she is set free to build sites, for fun and for professional work. She has done more coding in the last two months than she did way back when she was an engineer.

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• How Much More AI Do the Top Companies Use?

  Sarah Friar says frontier firms, the top 10% of companies in the world, use about 8 times as many agentic tokens on the OpenAI platform as an average firm. An economic research team published the comparison in September. Back in January the same gap was about 2 times. Use has started to accelerate for the frontier, and an average or below-average firm cannot get left behind.

  OpenAI's own agentic token use is 33 times the frontier. Friar says OpenAI has the benefit of living in the future and should not waste it. Her belief is that a year from now, or two years from now, frontier firms will have caught up to OpenAI, and traditional firms will have caught up to the frontier. The growth is hap

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• Why Does OpenAI Hold Back Cyber Models?

  Sarah Friar says OpenAI has held back models that are very cyber capable until the team is sure. The hold is not necessarily great for business in the short run, but it is mission aligned, and she believes it is good for business in the long run.

  She lays out three steps. The first is the hold. The second is doing the work, as with agentic swarms, until it feels safe to start again at the frontier. The third is going out into the world. Last week in Europe, one news report described a supermarket chain in France where hackers got into the systems and turned up the temperature on the freezers, spoiling all of the frozen goods. Older hacking, she says, looked like ransomware and attempts to b

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