OpenAI has disclosed that its products including ChatGPT, now have a user base of over 400 million. This is a 33% increase from December 2024.
According to Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, the company’s paying customer base is also growing rapidly. The ChatGPT developer currently has two million paying enterprise users, twice as many as in September 2024.
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OpenAI’s growth might make it easier for the company to close the $40 billion funding round it is believed to be raising. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank Group Corp. is helping the artificial intelligence provider find investors. It is expected that Softbank would lead the round with a commitment up to $25 million.
However, the growing user base also complicates OpenAI’s efforts to be profitable. The larger the user count is, the more OpenAI would have to spend, for hardware. In September 2024, it was reported that the company was expecting to end 2024 with a $5 billion loss on sales of $3.7 billion.
OpenAI hoped to generate profits with ChatGPT Pro, the AI chatbot’s premium version. ChatGPT Pro provides access to the company’s Operator task automation tool and several other benefits, costing 10 times as much as the second priciest consumer tier of ChatGPT. However, the company is still losing money.
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Lightcap said that OpenAI is seeing increased demand for not only ChatGPT but also its application programming interfaces (APIs). The executive detailed that developer traffic has doubled in the past six months. Usage of o3—a large language model (LLM) optimized for reasoning tasks—is up fivefold. It was introduced in December 2024.
Nevertheless, this is an important milestone for OpenAI that comes at a time of intense competition over AI. Chinese startup DeepSeek had recently made waves with its launch of its AI model which turned out to be far more efficient and cost effective than leading models. Elon Musk’s xAI has also recently released its latest chatbot Grok 3, which Musk described as “scary smart.”