OpenAI has reached 400 million weekly active users and doubled the number of enterprise customers

Today, OpenAI reported that ChatGPT and other company products are used by more than 400 million active users every week. This is 33% more than in December.

As OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcup told CNBC, the number of paid enterprise customers is also growing rapidly. Currently, the ChatGPT developer has 2 million corporate subscribers, which is twice as much as in September.

The continued growth of OpenAI's audience could make it easier to raise the $40 billion in funding that the company is supposed to be trying to raise right now. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that SoftBank Group Corp. helps OpenAI find investors. The Japanese tech giant is expected to lead the round with investments of up to $25 billion.

According to the report, this funding round could more than double OpenAI's valuation to $340 billion.

However, despite the growing audience, OpenAI faces profitability challenges. The more users that sign up for ChatGPT, the higher the company's server and hardware costs. In September, The New York Times reported that OpenAI expects a loss of $5 billion by the end of 2024, with projected revenue of $3.7 billion.

The company expected to make a profit using ChatGPT Pro, a premium version of its chatbot launched in December. Subscribing to this service includes access to the Operator task automation tool and a number of other features. However, despite the price being 10 times higher than the second-most expensive consumer tariff, OpenAI still incurs losses on this product.

One of the reasons is the high cost of the hardware required to run ChatGPT Pro. This version provides unlimited access to the company's most powerful models, and also includes a deep research mode that improves the quality of responses by using more computing resources.

In an interview with CNBC, Lightcap also noted the growing demand not only for ChatGPT, but also for the OpenAI API. According to him, developer traffic has doubled in the last six months, and the use of the o3 model has grown fivefold.

O3, introduced in December — is a language model optimized for complex reasoning tasks. Internal OpenAI tests showed that it scored 10 times more points than the previous record holder on one of the most complex mathematical benchmarks for AI.

The growth in demand reported by Lightcap today is mainly driven by the o3-mini, the only version of the model available to developers at the moment. This is a simplified version, sacrificing some output quality for speed and reducing the cost of calculations.

According to media reports, OpenAI aims to increase its audience to 1 billion weekly active users by the end of the year. At the same time, the company plans to triple its revenue to $11.6 billion. In the long run, OpenAI aims to break the $100 billion mark in annual revenue by 2029, when it also expects to turn a profit.