OpenAI continues to dominate the generative AI landscape, announcing 400 million weekly active users as of February 2025. This represents a remarkable 33% increase in less than three months, showcasing the platform’s growing popularity and resilience amidst emerging competition.
OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap, confirmed these impressive figures to CNBC, highlighting a “natural progression” of growth driven by expanding features and increased user familiarity. This significant jump from the 300 million weekly users reported in December 2024 demonstrates the continued momentum of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship product.
While facing competition from rivals like Google’s Gemini language models and the Chinese startup DeepSeek, OpenAI has successfully maintained its leading position. DeepSeek, leveraging open-source models with comparable power, has posed an unexpected challenge. However, OpenAI’s strong consumer base and strategic partnerships within the enterprise sector have proven invaluable.
Lightcap revealed that OpenAI’s enterprise business has doubled since September 2024, reaching 2 million paying customers. He attributed this success partly to enthusiastic individual users recommending ChatGPT to their organizations. Major clients include prominent names like Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile. This organic adoption within the enterprise space provides a significant advantage for OpenAI.
Developer engagement has also seen substantial growth, doubling in the past six months, with usage of the o3 reasoning model quadrupling. This surge in developer activity underscores the expanding ecosystem built around OpenAI’s technologies. Developers are actively leveraging available code and models to create innovative products and services, further solidifying OpenAI’s influence within the AI development community.
Despite the competitive landscape, Lightcap expressed a positive outlook on DeepSeek’s emergence. He viewed it as a testament to the transformative power of AI and its increasing integration into daily life. While DeepSeek’s entry impacted the stock valuation of several companies and raised concerns about data extraction methods, OpenAI’s performance remained strong.
Data from Similarweb in late January showed DeepSeek reaching peak daily visits of 49 million. However, ChatGPT maintained its dominance with 139.3 million daily visits during the same period. This data clearly demonstrates ChatGPT’s continued leadership in the AI chatbot market.
Addressing OpenAI’s open-source strategy, CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in a recent Reddit AMA that the company had “dropped the ball” in this area, while also stating it wasn’t their top priority. ChatGPT initially launched as an open-source research project but has since become more proprietary. Altman and other OpenAI executives hinted at future plans to open-source older AI models, though specific details remain scarce.
OpenAI’s impressive user growth and robust performance amid competition signal a bright future for the company. The continued expansion of features, coupled with strategic partnerships and a growing developer ecosystem, positions OpenAI as a dominant force in the rapidly evolving AI industry.
