ChatGPT maker OpenAI says more than 400 million people a week are now actively using its artificial intelligence tools, a jump from the 300 million it reported this past December.
OpenAI touted the figure this week, also telling media outlets that it’s doubled its number of paid enterprise users to 2 million since September, and that its developer traffic has also doubled in the last six months.
The news may surprise people who expected the rise of China’s DeepSeek AI model to disrupt the growth of more-established companies working on generative AI. DeepSeek made waves last month with high-profile assertions of more-efficient model design and free-to-use tiers.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become wildly popular as a top tool for generative AI and is used by individuals and businesses for a wide variety of tasks. But it’s one of several Gen AI tools in an increasingly competitive space that includes offerings such as Apple Intelligence, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot (Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI), Anthropic’s Claude and others.
The debut of DeepSeek raised the possibility that there may be other up-and-coming challengers for the AI throne that aren’t as costly and are more efficient than the more-established AI models. But DeepSeek has also had issues with cyberattacks and outages.
OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, told CNBC that some of ChatGPT’s growth is coming from word of mouth among consumers. “They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
The COO said enterprise growth is being helped by usage from nonbusiness customers, and that OpenAI expects that many companies will come to rely on AI services the way they rely on cloud computing.
Others in the industry are closely watching how this plays out for ChatGPT and whether the company will maintain its dominance. Dmitry Zakharchenko, chief software officer at Blaize, an AI computer hardware company based in El Dorado Hills, California, is among those monitoring the AI war as it unfolds.
Zakharchenko said the AI landscape has changed drastically since six months ago, when the prevailing belief was that in a few years there wouldn’t be enough electrical energy to power AI’s exponentially growing needs.
“DeepSeek sent a signal to the AI market that the trend of impossible costs is now officially over,” Zakharchenko said. “The market received the signal, and OpenAI started to message that they are getting smaller and will continue to be, thawing the budgets and reinvigorating the Gen AI spend.”
Zakharchenko said that rather than hurting OpenAI, which already had a foothold with users, the arrival of DeepSeek has had the opposite effect. Users now know that “small AI” is already here, he said, so they’re confident OpenAI will reduce prices (which it already has), focus on smaller AI and open itself up, because DeepSeek is open source.
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