Even by Silicon Valley standards, OpenAI’s scale is staggering. In March, the company closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation. ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users, and the company’s revenue has climbed to $2 billion a month. Rivals including Anthropic and Google are pressing hard, but OpenAI remains the company setting the pace of AI deployment, with a reach that spans consumers, developers, and businesses. Meanwhile, the company has roiled controversy, signing a Pentagon deal the same day rival Anthropic was banned from government work, and fighting allegations that ChatGPT may have played a role in a suicide and a mass shooting.

To sustain its scale, OpenAI has been building out a sprawling infrastructure network with partners including Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, SoftBank, and Nvidia, while also trying to tighten its product strategy. In recent weeks, it shut down Sora, its video-generation app, and indefinitely paused plans for an erotic mode as it redirected attention toward products with clearer commercial payoff, especially coding, workplace tools, and enterprise services. OpenAI’s pitch is that ChatGPT’s consumer reach now gives it a direct path into offices and organizations around the world. “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo reportedly told employees at an internal meeting in March.  —Tharin Pillay

Disclosure: Investors in OpenAI include Salesforce, where TIME co-chair and owner Marc Benioff is CEO. OpenAI and TIME also have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME’s archives.