Compare / OpenAI vs Pinterest
OPENAI
Started as a nonprofit to save humanity from AI, converted to a "capped-profit" structure when saving humanity…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
OpenAI
BUSINESS MODEL
OpenAI
OpenAI makes money primarily through API access and subscriptions. The API charges developers per token (roughly per word) for using GPT models in their applications.
ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month for individual users, ChatGPT Team is $25-30/user/month, and ChatGPT Enterprise is custom-priced. Microsoft pays OpenAI licensing fees and also resells OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service.
OpenAI's annualised revenue ran past $13 billion during 2025 and kept climbing from there, which is the kind of growth curve that normally only exists in a pitch deck.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
OpenAI
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. The founding donors — including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston — pledged $1 billion with a mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit all of humanity.
The idea was that AI was too important and too dangerous to leave in the hands of Google alone.
Sam Altman became chairman while Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe) became president. Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers alive, left Google Brain to become chief scientist.
The early team was stacked with world-class researchers who published their work openly — hence "Open" AI.
But AI research turned out to be staggeringly expensive. Training large models required millions of dollars in compute.
In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary — investors could earn up to 100x their money, but profits beyond that would flow to the nonprofit. Microsoft invested $1 billion.
The mission was still to save humanity. The method now involved making a lot of money first.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
OpenAI
ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was the growth strategy — it just wasn't planned that way. The team expected a modest research preview.
Instead, ChatGPT hit 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The product went viral because it felt like magic — for the first time, anyone could have a natural conversation with a machine that seemed to understand them.
The Microsoft partnership provided distribution at massive scale. Microsoft integrated OpenAI models into Bing, Office 365 (Copilot), GitHub (Copilot), and Azure.
Overnight, hundreds of millions of Microsoft users had access to OpenAI technology. Microsoft's $13 billion investment was the largest AI bet in history and gave OpenAI nearly unlimited compute.
The API created an ecosystem. Thousands of startups built products on top of OpenAI's models — from customer service bots to coding assistants to content generators.
Each API customer locked themselves into OpenAI's ecosystem, creating switching costs and recurring revenue.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
OpenAI
The board crisis of November 2023 nearly destroyed the company. The nonprofit board fired Sam Altman as CEO on a Friday, citing a loss of confidence.
Within 48 hours, 95% of employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. By Tuesday, Altman was reinstated and the board was restructured.
The incident exposed the fundamental tension between OpenAI's nonprofit governance and its for-profit ambitions — a tension it finally addressed in late 2025 by restructuring the business as a public benefit corporation sitting under the original nonprofit.
The cost of training frontier models is eye-watering. Each new GPT generation costs hundreds of millions to train.
OpenAI is reportedly spending over $7 billion annually on compute. The company is burning through cash faster than almost any startup in history, which is why it keeps raising at higher and higher valuations.
If revenue growth slows before costs stabilize, the math gets ugly.
Safety concerns are not going away. Multiple prominent researchers have left OpenAI over disagreements about the pace of development versus safety research.
Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who was central to the board's decision to fire Altman, left in 2024 to start a safety-focused AI lab. The public debate about whether OpenAI is moving too fast — and whether its safety commitments are genuine — grows louder with every capability improvement.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
OpenAI
ChatGPT is the consumer chatbot — the product that made AI mainstream overnight. The flagship GPT models are multimodal, handling text, images, and audio in one system.
The OpenAI API lets developers integrate GPT into any application. DALL-E generates images from text descriptions.
Whisper transcribes and translates audio. Sora generates videos from text prompts.
GPT Store lets users create and share custom GPT agents. ChatGPT Enterprise gives businesses a private, secure version of ChatGPT with admin controls and no data training.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
OpenAI
Microsoft ($13B), Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, SoftBank, a16z
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.