San Francisco-based OpenAI has reached 400 million weekly active users, marking a 33 percent increase from 300 million in December, according to COO Brad Lightcap. The surge underscores the growing adoption of ChatGPT, fueled by word-of-mouth popularity and increasing enterprise demand, CNBC reported.
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Enterprise Adoption Doubles
"People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it," Lightcap reportedly said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. "There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable."
OpenAI now has 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, Lightcap said, according to the report. He pointed out that employees often use ChatGPT personally and then suggest its implementation to their companies.
Companies like Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile are integrating OpenAI's AI models into their operations. Developer engagement has also skyrocketed, with traffic doubling in the past six months and quintupling for OpenAI's latest "reasoning" model, o3.
Lightcap compared this adoption to the rise of cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the "process of building up," he reportedly said.
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"There's a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business," Lightcap explained, according to the report. "AI is going to be like cloud services. It's going to be something that you can't run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface."
"The numbers tell the story," Lightcap said, according to the report "We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Elon Musk) is a competitor. He's competing. It's an unorthodox way of competing."
Financial Performance and Investment Interest
Despite its growth, OpenAI remains unprofitable, projecting USD 5 billion in losses on USD 3.7 billion in revenue for 2024. However, CFO Sarah Friar, according to another CNBC report, suggested that USD 11 billion in revenue is within reach. OpenAI is in talks for a USD 40 billion investment from SoftBank, potentially valuing the company at nearly USD 300 billion.
Reportedly, Friar also said that the OpenAI's pace of innovation has prevented it from becoming a "commodity." "We have managed to punch well above our weight to become effectively a hyperscaler, both in terms of the compute that we’re buying and the way we’re investing in it," she said, according to the report.
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Earlier this month, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman rejected a more than USD 97 billion bid from co-founder Elon Musk and a group of investors to take control of the startup.
Friar, according to the report, emphasised that OpenAI remains focused on its mission to make search, research and other tasks easier for their users.
"We are eyes on the prize, which is, how do we keep growing our business," she reportedly said. "You see it in our numbers."
