ChatGPT parent OpenAI’s weekly active users surge past 400 million despite DeepSeek’s emergence
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OpenAI reported a twofold increase in developer traffic for its reasoning models over the last six months.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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NEW YORK - ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s weekly active users surged past 400 million in February, highlighting rapid growth in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The start-up had 300 million weekly active users in December 2024. Its paying business users also crossed two million in February, more than doubling from its last update in September 2024.
The upbeat numbers come weeks after China’s DeepSeek launched an AI model it said could match or even outperform Western rivals at a fraction of the cost, stirring doubts about US dominance in the generative AI space.
But a surge in demand for DeepSeek since then has caused outages at the small start-up.
There have also been questions around how DeepSeek was able to obtain Nvidia’s H800 chips, used to train AI models, even though Washington had banned their exports to China.
OpenAI reported a twofold increase in developer traffic for its reasoning models over the last six months and a fivefold surge for its o3 model since its launch in late January.
The figures come as OpenAI faces not just new competition from DeepSeek, but also legal challenges from its co-founder Elon Musk, who recently sued the company over its move to convert to a for-profit entity.
OpenAI last week dismissed a US$97.4 billion (S$130 billion) bid
Mr Musk released his AI company’s latest ChatGPT rival Grok 3 o
The proliferation of models and chatbots has sown doubt that the companies will be able to book a return on the massive investments needed to train the models.
OpenAI is currently in talks with SoftBank for a potential US$40 billion investment that could value the Microsoft-backed company at approximately US$300 billion, according to CNBC. REUTERS, AFP
