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With 400 million users, OpenAI maintains lead in competitive AI landscape

Competition in the AI industry remains tough, and OpenAI has proven that it is not taking any coming challenges lightly. The generative AI brand announced Thursday that it services 400 million weekly active users as of February, a 33% increase in less than three months.

OpenAI chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap confirmed the latest user statistics to CNBC, indicating that the figures had not been previously reported. The numbers have quickly risen from previously confirmed stats of 300 million weekly users in December.

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The AI company has seen unexpected competition in the Chinese startup, DeepSeek, which is marketing AI services of comparable power run by open-source models. However, Lightcap told CNBC that the growth of the company’s flagship product, ChatGPT has been a “natural progression” as it gains more features, and more people become familiar with the service.

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Ahead of the introduction of DeepSeek, OpenAI already had heavy competition from other notable brands such as Google, and its Gemini language model family. However, in addition to a loyal consumer base, OpenAI has also been able to leverage partners in the enterprise space.

Lightcap said the company has seen its enterprise business double since September 2024, to 2 million paying customers. The executive noted employees will recommend ChatGPT to their organizations after using the tool as an enthusiast. The company includes Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile as some of its largest accounts.

“We get a lot of benefits, and a tailwind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product. There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve,” he told CNBC.

Additionally, developer usage has also doubled in the last six months, with the use of the o3 reasoning model increasing times four. Developers independently utilize available code and models to create their own products and services.

Despite the shakeup it has brought to the industry, Lightcap spoke positively about DeepSeek, nothing that its inception speaks to the power of AI models and how much the technology has become a staple in the everyday.

The Chinese company notably affected the stock valuation of several companies. Additionally, details surfaced indicating that DeepSeek used an illegal method called distillation to extract data from OpenAI to train its own models.

Other figures show that OpenAI’s services didn’t flounder amid the media frenzy surrounding DeepSeek. Similwarweb stats from late January indicated that DeepSeek saw peak daily visits of 49 million, while ChatGPT remained the leading AI tool with 139.3 million daily visits in the same timeframe.

OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman stated in a recent Reddit AMA that the company dropped the ball in terms of open-source development, but also added that it is not the brand’s highest priority. Notably, the company launched ChatGPT as an open-source research project, but it has become more proprietary over time. Without giving much detail, Altman, along with other OpenAI executives, suggested that the company has plans to make older AI models open source in the future.

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