OpenAI reaches 400M weekly active users, doubles enterprise customer base – News

OpenAI today disclosed that ChatGPT and its other products have more than 400 million active weekly users, a 33% increase from December. 

OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap (pictured) told CNBC that the company’s paying customer base is growing rapidly as well. The ChatGPT developer currently has 2 million paying enterprise users, twice as many as in September. 

OpenAI’s continued user growth might make it easier for the company to close the $40 billion funding round that it’s believed to be raising. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank Group Corp. is helping the artificial intelligence provider find investors. The Japanese tech giant is expected to lead the round with a commitment of up to $25 billion.

The investment could more than double OpenAI’s current valuation to $340 billion, according to the report.

Though the company’s user base growth may prove conducive to the fundraising push, it could complicate its efforts to become profitable. The more users sign up for ChatGPT, the more OpenAI has to spend on hardware to meet demand. The New York Times reported in September that the company was expecting to end 2024 with a $5 billion loss on sales of $3.7 billion.

OpenAI hoped to generate a profit with ChatGPT Pro, a premium version of its ChatGPT that launched in December. It provides access to the company’s Operator task automation tool and several other benefits. ChatGPT Pro costs 10 times as much as the second priciest consumer tier of ChatGPT, but OpenAI is nonetheless losing money on the product.

ChatGPT Pro provides unlimited access to the company’s hardware-intensive reasoning models. Additionally, there’s a deep research mode that boosts the quality of prompt responses by increasing the amount of infrastructure used to generate them. The hardware costs associated with those features are likely among the reasons that ChatGPT Pro isn’t profitable. 

In today’s CNBC interview, Lightcap detailed that OpenAI is seeing increased demand for not only ChatGPT but also its application programming interfaces. The executive detailed that developer traffic has doubled in the past six months. Usage of o3 is up fivefold.

Introduced in December, o3 is a large language model optimized for reasoning tasks. To demonstrate its capabilities, OpenAI had the model tackle one of the industry’s most complicated AI math benchmarks in an internal test. The company says that o3 achieved a score 10 times higher than the previous record-holder.

The fivefold demand increase that Lightcap disclosed today was presumably achieved by o3-mini, the only version of o3 that is currently available for developers. It’s a scaled-down edition of the original that trades off some output quality for faster performance and lower inference costs.

OpenAI has reportedly set out to boost its installed base to one billion weekly active users by year’s end. In the same time frame, the company expects to more than triple its revenue to $11.6 billion. OpenAI reportedly hopes to top $100 billion in sales by 2029, which is also when it expects to become profitable. 

Photo: OpenAI